Sussex mother campaigns to get MPs to seek infertility treatment

A mum who is campaigning to end inequality in access to infertility treatment across the country is to head to Westminster to discuss the “injustice” with MPs.

Katie says that going through five rounds of IVF was painful.

We were on our last legs emotionally and financially.”

Because they live in Sussex, their first three rounds of IVF were funded by the NHS, before they spent thousands on their fourth and fifth attempts.

Katie is taking the campaign group she co-founded, Fertility Access UK, to Parliament for a meeting with MPs on Wednesday.

Fertility Access UK says that while one in six people will suffer from infertility, only 27% of IVF cycles in 2022 were funded by the NHS. This has decreased from 40% in 2012.

The average cost of a personal bicycle including testing is £13,750.

Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) say that regional integrated care boards should fund three cycles of IVF, but the funding offered and the criteria to be eligible for them vary between regions.

Katie said: “A 35-year-old woman in Hampshire is already old, but here in Sussex you can be 42 and still get it.

“This is absolutely bizarre and inappropriate. I want to make it consistent.”

Katie and her husband Tom say they were “overwhelmed” when they gave birth to twins Ralph and Alice.

Now mother-of-three Katie is campaigning to give others the same opportunities she had.

As the director of a successful business, she said: “I suddenly realized that if I wasn’t in the position I was in now, I probably wouldn’t be the mother I am today.

“I know hundreds, if not thousands, of women and men who are desperate to become parents and just can’t do it because of money, and I think there’s a tremendous injustice in that,” she said.

“I felt a passion to try to do something to change it because it doesn’t feel fair.”

Katie will be joined by leading consultant gynecologist and fertility expert Dr Carol Gilling-Smith, who has helped thousands of expectant mothers conceive at her clinic in Hove.

Dr Gilling-Smith said: “Everyone should have the right to have a family.

“This should be part of the promise that the NHS makes to care for people who have both medical and emotional conditions who need help. It is discriminatory to single out one particular condition.

“It’s postcode-lottery driven, depending on where you live and what your local provision is, which is incredibly unfair.”

Claire Ettinghausen, director of strategy and corporate affairs at the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the UK fertility regulator, said: “Although the HFEA does not regulate the funding or cost of fertility treatment, it is important that people who seek fertility treatment “Commission services to review whether their funding eligibility criteria have an adverse impact on access to treatment among particular patient groups.”