According to the BBC more than half of fertility experts agree that IVF should be conditional and smokers and the obese should be denied access to treatment: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7523172.stm
Am I missing something really obvious here? Surely if couples are having trouble conceiving and have to seek help (which implies that they are extremely keen to have a baby), they will do everything in their power to limit any potential stumbling block such as their weight or lifestyle?
I was lucky enough to conceive naturally but once we made the decision to ‘try’ for a baby (I still hate that term), I made some changes to my lifestyle. I don’t smoke so didn’t have to worry about that. I stopped drinking. I’d been going to the gym for a couple of years so was in reasonably good shape. I started taking folic acid supplements. I tried (and failed) to stop being such a stress-head.
I didn’t expect dh to give up drinking but his intake reduced to virtually nil by extension of the fact that I wasn’t having alcohol. He is also a non-smoker and isn’t into banana-hammocks so his swimmers were allowed to frolic freely. Neither of us have ever taken drugs.
In short, we made little changes. Now, I’m not saying that my decision to stop drinking made me super-duper fertile but I know if one of the girls had had a medical problem that could have been avoided by making a small change to my lifestyle before I conceived and during my pregnancy I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself.
If we’d had trouble conceiving (and I fully expected to, hence my evangelical zeal for an alcohol-free existence), I couldn’t in all consciousness have gone to see a fertility doctor and sat there stinking of smoke, overweight and in poor health and asked them to help us have a baby.
If you want a baby so much that you are willing to go through the pain and agony of IVF then surely you are willing to do everything in your power to make having a baby a possibility, from limiting your alcohol units to losing weight to giving up your recreational drug of choice?