With regard to the cost of adoption, I am not sure where you get the 35k from (travel costs for a foreign adoption?) but in any event my point still stands, these IVF vs adoption traumas are strictly for the middle classes. If you’re poor you get neither.
As for your God/Mother Nature “abortionist” comment…what? Are you seriously trying to establish an equivalence between an abortion and a miscarriage?

I really can’t believe you said this – it’s easy to see that you have children already. I may be part of an infertile couple but I don’t think that gives anyone any right to tell me what I can and can’t do with my body – and if I decide to try IVF that is a decision for my partner and I alone. And I can assure you, it is a lot easier to say ‘forget about having children of your own’ than to actually do it. I thought you professed to be a feminist but you want to ‘tell’ other adult women what to do with their bodies and their lives?????

Btw, your stats on the sucess rate are outdated – the success rate per embyro transfer is now between 30%-35%, but as most couples do multiple cycles the sucess rate per couple is higher again. And yes, IVF is very expensive and it is not covered by the public health system or by private health insurers – this adds greatly to the stress and misery of it all.

Maybe you should read some adoption boards before offering that as some sort of panacea – again, due to this wonderful fantastic country of ours it takes 2 years to even get an appointment with a social worker, and approx. 5 years and 9 months from application to having a child placed with you. Also, it costs approx. 35k to adopt – this puts huge pressure on infertile couples to end fertility treatment early as there is only so much money to go round. Plus, make any complaints about delays and/or your social worker and they have the ultimate cop-out of ‘haven’t come to terms with their infertility’ to knock you out of the application process. It’s a bite-your-tongue yes-sir, no-sir process. Makes it look a slightly less rosier picture, no?

As only 30 – 35% of embyro transfers result in an on-going pregnancy, and even allow for some possible reduction due to the medical intervention, that still makes God/Mother Nature the greatest abortionist around.

You think wrong. Fertilisation results in anything from 0 to 6+ human beings. Monozygotic twins can even fuse and result in a single human chimera. Genes are irrelevant to personhood and science has nothing to say on the subject.

Besides, most fertlised eggs do not make it. Over half die before birth. If that were happening to real children it would be the biggest public health emergency in all of recorded history. It would dwarf the death toll of the black death, nagasaki, hiroshima, and all of the wars ever fought. But since it is not happening to real children, nobody cares and neither do you.

Don’t believe me? Imagine that you happened upon a burning school. Would you run in and save the children inside, even at risk to your own life?

Now imagine that you happened upon a burning IVF clinic. Would you run in and save the fertilised eggs inside, even at risk to your own life?

All of which goes to show that the ‘pro-life’ don’t care about fertilised eggs half as much as they pretend.

My opinion is not based on the biological viability of the embryo, but it does coincide with it. A frozen embryo’s chance of life is determined by its parents ability to give it life, or to continue its development. It is simply not workable to guarantee a right to life of every embryo produced through IVF. What happens if the parents’ circumstances change dramatically before transferral has taken place? If one parent, in particular the mother, is diagnosed with a terminal illness? If one parent, in particular the mother, dies or disappears? How do we continue to give the remaining embryos life?

In more likely circumstances, what if a couple want one child, but an IVF cycle produces 15 embryos? Should they be forced to undergo transferrals until all embryos have been given an equal chance of life? No matter how many children are born? What if the first successful IVF happens when the couple are in their forties? Should they be forced to endure procedures well into their fifties?

If your answer to all these questions is the IVF itself is unworkable because of the “loss of life”, then my response is that above all IVF creates life (and a desperately wanted one at that), it does not destroy it.

Which brings me back to the issue of viability. It is not just that a frozen embryo is not viable until implantation, it is also not viable until the parents are willing and able to give it a 25% chance of implantation.

And let’s not forget birthdays – we may meet again shortly…