When did having children become a right?

Ontario has a $10.9 billion deficit. Ontario’s health budget under the Liberals is $50.1 billion (a 2.8 per cent increase over the last year), which represents 41.9 per cent of all program spending in the province. A growing and ageing population requires care. Seniors take up half of the health care dollars which could lead to 59 per cent of health costs by 2031. And the latest surveys tell us that we have reached a point where there are more Canadians over 65 than under 14. So why did the Ontario Liberal government decide to provide free in vitro insemination to all people who ask? One free cycle of IVF will be available “regardless of age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, family status, disability, etc.,” despite evidence that obesity can reduce success and research at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto shows that IVF has a success rate of 47% for women under 35 and drops to 25% for those 41 and 42. And they plan to go ahead despite the failure of a programme like this in Quebec.

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One “free” cycle is about $10,000. That works out to an extra $50 million a year to pay for about 5,000 patients annually to have one cycle each of in-vitro. This is in addition to the $16 million yearly for the lower-tech IUI fertility treatment and $4 million for IVF for women with blocked Fallopian tubes. Dr. Heather Shapiro, a vice-president of the Canadian Fertility & Andrology Society has made her opinion clear: “The desire to bear children and the inability to do so falls under the category of diminution of health,” she said. “Whether the obstacles are social or governmental, or the obstacle is physiological or pathological, I’m not going to play semantics with those words.” So I assume, based on her logic, that she is in favour of IVF virgin births like the ones taking place in Britain where there have been at least 25 such births in the past five years. A new demographic wanting children. These women want children now and are planning to save sex for a “special relationship.” Tracey Sainsbury, a senior fertility counsellor and research officer at the London Women’s Clinic, said she saw about two single, virgin women a year wanting to have a baby. “Some have never had a relationship, others have been in a relationship but never had sexual intercourse, some are single lesbian women; for others there may be psychological or medical reasons why they have never had sex.” Maha Ragunath, medical director of a fertility clinic in Nottingham, said: “When I ask them why they are coming for treatment, very often the response is that they are ready to have a child and they don’t want to wait around for the right partner to come along.” She added “A lot of them are very young, in their twenties, sometimes studying or doing very ordinary jobs and often living with their parents, rather than career women who have been driven and focused too much on their work.” As Josephine Quintavalle from Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: “What is the child for these women? A teddy bear that they pick off the shelf?” Ethicists expressed their concerns about IVF in 1978 when Doctors Steptoe and Edwards delivered the first successful IVF baby in Britain-Baby Loiuse, July 25, 1978. I remember this as if it were yesterday. IVF raised questions about the meaning of life. “When does life begin? If human life begins at conception, are doctors killing potential humans when they discard fertilized eggs? (Doctors may remove several eggs from the woman and may discard some that have been fertilized.) Is this process a foreshadowing of what is to come? Will there be surrogate mothers? Was Aldous Huxley predicting the future when he described breeding farms in his book Brave New World?” Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University said “… A legitimate concern [was and still is] that widespread in vitro fertilization, the conceiving of children outside of ordinary marital sexual union in essentially technical circumstances, would lead us to view children, at a kind of deep level, as operational objectives, as products that are for us to conceive on our own terms and in our own way…” and it leads to “Questions of human dignity.” … Today we are dealing with the buying and selling of gametes, and renting wombs for implantation while at the same time we are aborting fetuses. So I ask you, when did having children become an inalienable right? When did we become a society where people deserve to have children? Our constitution speaks of peace, order and good government and the Americans talk about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But where is there in the social contract the expectation that tax payers will make it possible for all women, and men too, to have children?