Heartfelt pleas from families hoping to start or continue their IVF journey have emerged after Victoria implemented a three-month ban on new treatment cycles as its COVID-19 cases surge.
Non-urgent elective surgeries, including IVF, have been suspended yet again as hospitals grapple with increased admissions in the Omicron outbreak. It’s particularly concerning for older women or women with limited ovarian reserves when every month IVF is delayed has a direct effect on their chances of carrying a baby to term.
Experts are very worried the impact on Australia’s population growth could be permanent as population growth grinds to a near standstill.
There is a backlog of tens of thousands on all elective surgery waitlists.
Low fertility rates could be permanent
For women over 40, every month counts in IVF. One study found a delay of six months in women aged 40 to 42 decreased IVF live births by 11.8%. Another UK study estimated a six-month shutdown on IVF treatment due to COVID hospital pressures reduced the live birthrate by 1.6% with thousands fewer babies born.
Australian families are having families later in life and having fewer children. The median age of parents has steadily increased since the ‘80s. In 2020, it was 31.6 for mothers and 33.6 for fathers, compared with 26.5 and 29.4 in 1980. Most new mothers are aged between 30 and 34.
Fertility rates have decreased since the ‘70s too: women are having fewer children on average, decreasing from 2.9 in 1971 to 1.58 in 2020. Victorian mothers have the second-highest median age in the country behind the ACT at 32.3 and the lowest fertility rate at 1.43 babies per woman.
COVID is having a massive impact on family growth. ANU demographer and social researcher Liz Allen said: “We’re seeing people postponing and possibly even forgoing having children during periods of COVID because of the uncertainty.” Many people are not meeting prospective partners due to lockdowns.
This could have long-lasting impacts.
“When we see fertility fall to a low level, we only need to look to China and to South Korea to see that it’s very hard to bounce back from that,” Allen said. “The establishment of a new norm when it comes to that demographic measure could become entrenched and has a major historical impact … It’s a recipe for disaster.”
As Australia has seen, an ageing population has massive impacts on the economy, with fewer tax dollars and labour shortages. While there are arguments smaller populations are better for the climate, Allen believes this should be addressed with policy, not by pressuring parents to not have kids.
“We’re going to be pressured to do more with less as the population ages, and we’ll have a situation where we risk our living standards going backwards,” Allen said.
What affects fertility?
Despite popular belief, age isn’t the biggest thing affecting fertility. In fact, the widely cited statistic that women’s fertility drops off at age 35 is a myth, based on data from the 1700s. While the quality of eggs declines over time, the same is true for sperm.
Almost one in 20 children was born via IVF in Australia in 2020, but fertility specialist and University of Melbourne associate professor Alex Polyakov says much of this is due to women pursuing studies and careers before starting families.
“IVF was never designed to counteract fertility decline due to age because we have to rely on the presence of good quality eggs to be successful in IVF,” he said.
“The biggest problem is that a lot of women that I see that are older or single [and starting a family] is because they couldn’t find a partner to settle down with to have children … I think it’s a social thing, I don’t think it’s medical.”
Australia has strict regulations around egg and sperm donation. Donors can’t be paid, but can be reimbursed for their travel and medical costs and are not reimbursed for their time or lost work.
Most Australian states and territories limit donors to contributing to five families, including their own. This has led to more and more families travelling abroad to use egg banks, known as reproductive tourism. The eggs cannot be imported to Australia, so the entire IVF treatment has to be done offshore. Pandemic travel bans further affected that.
Families want more kids but are hindered by policy
While many people are choosing to not have children, many families want more kids — data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey showed people weren’t achieving their desired family size, hindered by poor policy and support. Allen says for families to reach their desired size, four main policy areas must be addressed.
“From my perspective as a demographer that’s housing affordability, gender equality — including childcare — employment security, and climate change,” she said.
“At the moment, the future is being decided by people at one end of the demographic spectrum, possibly at the cost of people at the other end of the demographic.”
My heart goes out to those desperate for children.
Notwithstanding so called “experts” wringing their hands about Australia’s population growth need to get a grip.
Pre-COVID we were growing at 1.6% per annum ie way above our major trading partners.
Seriously who believes that is either desirable or sustainable?
Economists! Politicians! Its all money money money to them and bugger the environment!
Totally.
Throw in demographers for good measure who are nothing but professional big Australia boosters.
With respect, another diatribe in the vein of the maltreatment of women is out of place in the face of the anguish wrought by the postponement or cancellation of general “elective” surgeries. There are many people awaiting knee replacement surgery, hip replacement surgery, cataract corrections, hernia repair surgery, and yes, even cancer treatments – all of which are needed to return some quality of life to people suffering from immobility issues, suffering constant pain and discomfort. Surely IVF is truly elective, in as much as the person requiring that treatment is not suffering serious deterioration in quality of life. What of the person suffering with a cancerous tumour, waiting in line for surgery and watching fearfully as their tumour grows from a few millimetres to the size of a golf ball? With scarce and shrinking health resources, IVF treatments would not be at the top of my list.
. …and unable to earn a living or contribute to the family work effort due to their pain or disability….
I am sorry but I was utterly enraged by that post of that young woman and her distress about the postponement of her IVF. Why is that womans need to have a baby more important than others needs to have that diagnostic procedure to detect cancer or indeed to have that “elective” surgery to replace incredibly painful joints that are no longer functional. And then we have the issue of the utter neglect of aged care and disability residential units.
I am so angry about the current situation. I do not understand why that young womans distress is so more important than the distress of so many other people.
Why do think her distress was somehow a denial of that of others? We can have sympathy and empathy for everyone who is experiencing bad outcomes and harms in this pandemic. Thank god most of us don’t have to make decisions choosing who to help given our limited resources. But everybody is entitled to feel their own distress for themselves and theirs. Where it gets poisonous is when we start making judgements about other people’s distress being unworthy.
An inability to conceive/carry to term suggests an unsuitable gene sequence – evolution ain’t susceptible to fashion or macho posturing but, as any biologist knows, an opportunity to help siblings survive & thrive.
The unselfish gene is stronger than deliberately pernicious and mendacious misunderstanding of the Dawk’s thesis.
How soon before the old sci-fi tropes of host wombs, using unrelated sperm & ova (hi, Elton!) become common, to assuage the ‘need to breed’?
Such selfish irresponsibility are the usual signs of a declining culture.
Sadly, health care and treatments are being rationed – no other way to put it. Therefore the provision of healthcare services to one person could well be at the expense of another. The furore in the media the last couple of days, and all because one sobbing individual went viral on a social media platform, and the sudden proliferation of sympathetic articles such as this one, are an affront to people who are genuinely in pain and suffering serious health issues – as opposed to people who simply can’t have their own way – but attracting overly much attention because they are female. In this manufactured “age of misogyny” being an unhappy female apparently trumps everything else.
Even though falling fertility is bad for society, I won’t be crying any tears for those that have left it too late. “Almost one in 20 children was born via IVF in Australia in 2020, but fertility specialist and University of Melbourne associate professor Alex Polyakov says much of this is due to women pursuing studies and careers before starting families. “You CANT Have it All”. You can’t have a career and then suddenly, at 35 or 40 decide that you now want kids, and IVF will save you. And halts to elective processes delay you even further. If you wanted kids you should have had them in your 20’s. And the line about fertility dropping off being a myth is an outright lie, of course it decreases, just like the mobility and number of sperm drop off as men age. Articles like this just give false hope to women who think that they can delay, have their shiny career, and drop in to their local IVF clinic whenever they feel like it. Wake up.
Imagine being so confident in your own wisdom that you are willing to tell ~a quarter of all women that they’re stupid and selfish and deserve any unhappiness associated with inability to have children later in life
Crikey commentors are the pits
Agreed, amazingly arrogant comment. As for all those men out there imagining it’s ok to have hard erections in their 50s and access to drugs for it, how dare they. They should have had them in their 20s and 30s.
Surely not that many men in their fifties are using those hard erections for procreation? Or am I missing some relevance in your comment? Come to think of it (no pun intended), I wonder what percentage of coitus is undertaken with the intentional outcome of pregnancy? No, some serious conflation going on in that comment.
The Catholic position on your question is answered in the opening song to Meaning of Life.
…oops, ‘position‘ was not intended as a pun but, now that I consider it….
Women can orgasm in their 50s and can access stimulants to help. Your analogy is not accurate.
Women have a shorter window to reproduce than men, but the rate of birth defects rises with the age of the male. From that perspective yes women deserve a helping hand to conceive, but I’m not sure it’s in societies net best interest to have ever increasing proportion of women relying on subsidized IVF. Where do we draw the line? 60? 70? 80? At what cost to society?
Should we then reward the woman who raises children earlier by helping her to afford the career, home and holidays that she made harder to obtain?
And let’s not forget that statistically, men die several years earlier than women in virtually every country. Are we going to spend billions fighting nature so that men can reach parity? I doubt it. Interesting how rarely men complain about dying earlier. Would be even more interesting if the genders were switched.
Interesting comment though my understanding of the reason men die earlier is not actually because they want to (I think!) like the joke goes but because of lifestyle choices and not seeking medical advice etc for potential issues / reluctance to go to doctors. So nature or nurture or personality traits?
No, thats a myth, but it’s nice to think that males are responsible for the short comings of both genders isn’t it?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151001-why-women-live-longer-than-men
Our Antechinus is an extreme example but in most mammalian species, especially in colder regions, the dominant male spends too much time fighting males and fertilising females than he has insufficient condition to survive winter.
Next season there is a new crop of bucks, from a genetic line two or three seasons earlier, so no probs.
The sooner that humans grasp the simple evolutionary fact that a family unit is mother & daughters plus offspring with occasional brief visits from transitory, short lived males (with an even shorter usefulness span) the better off society will be.
https://cheba.unsw.edu.au/blog/why-do-women-live-longer-men
Generalities are the pits. What part of ‘truth’ annoys you so much?
How long before IVF is marketted, with full specs. options, to those wanting designer babies?
It must be due to the national shortage of children in desperate need of adoption.
If you had taken a SLIGHTLY different tone Neal you might have made your point (which in essence I agree with) in a slightly less hostile, accusatory and somewhat sexist manner! 🙂 So rather than blaming those greedy, grasping women we could simply highlight that yes if having children is so very important to an individual they should prioritise that and work with nature rather than taking a rather twenty first century approach that medical marvels allows them to defy reality. People may also consider adoption to give some poor little orphan or unwanted tacker a chance though I understand this can be quite difficult. For those bringing Viagra induced erections versus pregnancy into the debate well that is a bit of an irrelevancy!
Frankly I am delighted by falling fertility because it is GREAT for the environment and should also result in a higher standard of living and wellbeing of individuals and society can bloody well make the necessary structural changes to accommodate a decreased population. Maybe by crazily preventing individuals from having more wealth than entire nations?! Eat or at least TAX the rich! The hand wringing over decreasing populations just leaves me cold even though its forty bloody degrees all this week in WA! 🙂
Thanks, well put and glad you went to the trouble. I was trying to ejeculate some satire to make the same point but seem to have failed. 🙁
Terrible pun intended clearly!
Why on earth did they leave the kitchen?
Naughty naughty naughty.
As you say, IVF is genuinely meaningful to a (relatively) small western middle-class cohort lucky enough to be able to seek it at all. But conflating it’s absence with world population shrinkage is ludicrous mathematically. To then argue that the consequential inability to sustain infinite population growth on a finite planet with finite resources is “a recipe for disaster” is even sillier. The opposite is true. The world population is already an unsustainable 8 billion, still growing at a net 80 million babies per year. Surely that’s more than enough future “carers” for everyone?
I think our best hope is to maintain the GDP and defensive capability of our country until aging populations are the norm in our region. Then we are all in the same boat. The pensioners in Indonesia aren’t going to attack the pensioners of Australia.
Question is whether the planet can survive until then ecologically.