(Sarah Lagan)
A
Worcestershire couple who won free fertility treatment as part of the
Birmingham Post’s controversial Funded Fertility Treatment For All
campaign have today announced they are expecting twins.
The
Trinity paper launched the campaign back in January to help four
couples chosen by fertility experts to conceive. The Post said the
campaign was a bid to urge primary health care trusts that did not
offer funded fertility treatment to meet the 1st April deadline set by
the then health secretary John Reid. In the Midlands only 30 per cent
of couples applying can get access to NHS funded fertility treatment,
the Post said.
Parents of the twins Lydia and William Stark have
written a diary for publication in the paper about their experiences
during treatment, finding out they were successful back in August and
the difficult period leading up to their 12-week scan.
Mrs
Stark told the paper: “Getting funding and treatment through the Post
and Medics at Midland Fertility Services has given us the chance to be
parents we never thought we’d be. We would qualify for NHS treatment
but so few women actually get funded through our PTC that we would have
to wait at least a year, if not longer, to get on top of the queue.”
The
Post has been publishing a series of in depth articles on fertility
treatment and with the permission of the couples involved will be
documenting their progress.
When the campaign was launched the
director of public interest group Comment Josephine Quintavalle blasted
the paper likening its campaign to “a media game…to sell newspapers”
and accused it of turning fertility funding into a “lottery.”
Post
editor Fiona Alexander stood by her campaign arguing it had put
infertility on the agenda nationally. She insisted that it was not a
“win a baby competition” and pointed out that IVF funding was already a
lottery.
She said: “We are doing what we think the government should be doing and putting our money where our mouth is.”
Two
couples who received a cycle of intra-uterine insemination (IUI) and a
course of IVF were unsuccessful and a third, unnamed couple, have had a
positive pregnancy test after a frozen embryo transfer. They are due a
second scan on Monday.
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