The privilege of IVF

On Sunday evening I received a text at 11:45pm. It was from a disturbed former staff member who has been through multiple life traumas from childhood through to the present, and whom we unfortunately needed to part ways with after they made an unsubstantiated claim to Fair Work Australia. The stress of the legal proceedings consumed most of my first trimester. Part of the text to me read:

“You have no idea of what it’s like to deal with survival stress….IVF overseas for how long? Do you realise the value of $? That you chose the things you blame for your stress?

Your privilege is insulting, whilst you proclaim a commitment to “purpose driven work”. It’s a slap in the face to people on the breadline like myself.”

Rewind three months prior to this message from the same individual:

”My gosh, so much has been happening in your life. I can only imagine how overwhelmed you're feeling right now. You're under immense personal pressure and it is a testament to your resilience and perseverance to stay strong and determined amid all the chaos. I genuinely value your mentorship and presence in my life. I'm eternally grateful that you took a shot with me.”

One thing I have learned in both business and IVF is that—as this person claimed in her most recent message to me—it truly, is a privilege.

A strange, odd, insane privilege, that some of us can (with either the help of insurance or our own access to money) put our bodies through the medical procedures required to give ourselves the chance of having a child.

Not only that, I founded Better IVF to support women who are generally, multiple cycles deep. Certainly our pockets are not endless, but they are deep enough that we are willing (and able) to pay tens of thousands of dollars for this often morbid privilege. Even where we access loans, the privilege of having a credit rating good enough to be able to do so is still just that. A privilege.

And yet, not being able to conceive a child does not feel like a privilege. In historical times it would have been a deep source of shame and societal exclusion. In our present times, it is one of significant personal and familial loss.

This former staff member’s text did not fill me with guilt or shame as perhaps they had intended. When one is so traumatised, so abandoned by so many people (and now in their eyes, by me too) the only possible power one may feel capable of wielding is that of cutting words.

But while their words did not cut me, they did give me opportunity to reflect on the dichotomy of this bizarre privilege. And to be grateful for it. To know that even the loneliness, pain and longing of infertility that we all experience is lessened for our financial ability to do something about it, to act on it. To soothe it.

So often, even in the IVF community, there are incomparable comparisons made.

“How many cycles did you do? Oh only five? I’ve done fifteen.”

“You’re so lucky you can get five blasts, mine don’t make it to day five.”

“You miscarried at 6 weeks? You don’t know loss, I had a still birth.”

The truth is that privilege and stress can co-exist. Privilege and pain can co-exist.

The value of dollars is equal to value that you ascribe it. A child is priceless. Or worth all of our wealth, or a significant portion of it.

I appreciate talking dollars for some people may be confronting but I think it’s important to share: I spent $110,000 on the child I carry inside me now. I am also living between homes, in over a quarter a million dollars of debt and having back that $100,000 would remove an immense amount of financial pressure that we are under. And yet, I would not change it. I could never regret the value judgements I have made.

For someone who might be barely able to afford to look after themselves, the entire idea of this world of medicalised conception I can imagine might appear like a gross privilege. And as often happens, our ability to maintain happiness and empathy for others is directly impacted by our own financial and life circumstances (as it was for my former staff member—between her initial and most recent messages).

For someone who desperately wants a child but cannot financially or emotionally afford IVF, the same often applies.

This conversation is not a comfortable one to have, or to think about. The messages I have shared here are raw and uncomfortable. I don’t do this work of IVF advocacy for older women because it is comfortable. I do it because this tension between financial access and decision making are crucial components to the ability to turn dreams into the potential for reality. Not talking openly about it is just another way that this journey is made more difficult. Therefore I am sharing the messy bits, as well as the clean in the hope that you can find some place to relate, and a way to share your own stories of paradox and privilege (or lack thereof) you’ve experienced.

When we make the financial choices we do for this journey, we can do little about our position of privilege to make our choice. What we can be however, is grateful for our ability to make a choice at all. And I truly, deeply am.