Usually I am very loathe to support government limitations on the medical services patients may seek. However, medical procedures designed to create new life directly affect people other than the patient, ie the children who are created. This alone justifies government intervention. The power to add more people to society also implies reactionary or limiting powers by the society over the creators in the context of maximising social welfare eg population engineering in Asia.
In reference to this article, for a morbidly obese mother to take radical medical action to become pregnant is unethical and abusive towards the child. For the NHS to be expected to finance such services is absolutely detrimental to British society. The demand of well-educated, hard-working labour to immigrate to Great Britain more than compensates for an otherwise negative population growth rate. Therefore, there is no reason for the government to finance such dangerous and expensive measures to add more children to the population.
4 comments:
Laws restricting a person's (in almost every case, a woman's) reproductive rights are just as offensive when applied to fertility as to abortion, and I believe the time-tested slogan "keep your laws off my body" applies here as well.
I agree that medical evidence points in the direction of encouraging obese women to lose weight before attempting pregnancy, and this is a personal issue that should be discussed with their doctors, not in law making bodies.
This BFS proposal also recommends that women over the age of 40 be denied fertility treatment. This can only lead to more social problems as women who may not feel that they are ready to raise children would be essentially encouraged to attempt pregnancy prematurely (if you will).
The BSF, like any medical body is recommending standards of treatment for doctors to follow. In the context of socialised medical care, such standards make sense especially for a luxury procedure like this. To me, financing and government burden is the major issue here - not total prohibitions.
Patients should still be permitted to seek such treatment from private physicians, but I believe the government, as in the Asian situation, should have the power of taxation over such socially deleterious procedures. However, a physician causing the pregnancy of an obviously unhealthy mother should be incurring large malpractice liability for the physician. A child born from such a pregancy with significant medical problems should be awarded significant damages from the fertility doctor. Therefore, in a well designed legal and medical system, very few doctors would be willing to perform such treatments regardless of decriminalisation.
"This BFS proposal also recommends that women over the age of 40 be denied fertility treatment. This can only lead to more social problems as women who may not feel that they are ready to raise children would be essentially encouraged to attempt pregnancy prematurely (if you will)."
This is another issue entirely, but my undersanding of human biology is that absent all other factors, children born to mothers 16-22 will be the healthiest and traditionally women would begin mothering children shortly after pregnancy. Since modern society has distorted incentives such that women comonly have offspring after age 40, for society to adjust those incentives to become pregnant at a younger age could be very beneficial to public health. Sweden is a perfect example of a country with low fertility, that gives significant welfare support to young mothers.
I am not necessarily supporting such welfare programmes, but there is an argument to be made.
Nonetheless, It is clear to me though, that the BFS's proposal of denying NHS fertility treatment for women who are over 40 or morbidly obese is rather sensible.
"...absent all other factors, children born to mothers 16-22 will be the healthiest..."
I would love to see some supporting documentation of this statement, as I have been unable to locate any myself in a cursory web search.
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