Sussex mother campaigning for fertility treatment to meet MPs

A mother who is campaigning for the end of disparity in the availability of fertility treatment across the country is to head to Westminster to discuss what she calls the “injustice” with MPs.

Katie says it was traumatic to go through five rounds of IVF.

“We were on our last cycle, both emotionally and financially,” she said.

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 the meeting with MPs on Wednesday.

Fertility Access UK says while one-in-six people will have fertility issues, only 27% of IVF cycles were funded by the NHS in 2022. That has dropped from 40% in 2012.

The average cost of a private cycle, including testing, is £13,750.

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) guidelines say regional integrated care boards should fund three cycles of IVF, but funding offers and the criteria to be eligible for them vary between areas.

Katie said: “A woman in Hampshire who is 35 has already been aged out, but here in Sussex you can be 42 and still get it.

“It’s just bizarre and so unfair. I want to make it consistent.”

Katie and her husband Tom say they were “just overwhelmed” when they conceived twins Ralph and Alice.

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

As a director of a successful business, she said: “I had a sudden realisation that if I wasn’t in the position that I’m in right now, I probably wouldn’t be a mother today.

“I know of hundreds, if not thousands of women and men, who are desperate to be parents and simply because of money they’re not able to and I think there’s too much injustice,” she said.

“I felt passionately about trying to do something to change that because it just doesn’t seem fair.”

Katie will be joined by leading consultant gynaecologist and fertility expert Dr Carole Gilling-Smith who has helped thousands of parents to conceive at her clinic in Hove.

Dr Gilling-Smith said: “The right to found a family should be there for everyone.

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

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

Clare Ettinghausen, directory of strategy and corporate affairs at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the UK’s fertility regulator, said: “While the HFEA does not regulate the funding or costs of fertility treatment, it is important that those who commission fertility services review whether their funding eligibility criteria have an adverse impact on access to treatment among particular patient groups.”