A lesbian couple seeking to become parents have spoken out about the cost involved with IVF, saying that they have spent over $30,000 since 2020 trying to get pregnant.
In an interview with Australia’s 9Honey, Steph and Kayla said in 2020, just one year after they began dating, they knew they wanted to start a family. “We looked into it pretty quickly after getting together, because Kayla didn’t want to be 30 and still trying for a child,” Steph said.
Among both gay and straight couples, IVF has become incredibly popular in Australia; according to 9Honey, one in every 18 babies is conceived through IVF. Steph, however, said they weren’t prepared for the astronomical costs involved. “We drained our bank accounts pretty quickly, then our weekly wages. We would pay our important bills like rent, then everything else would go into IVF,” she said.
So far, they have gone through 15 rounds of IVF, every one of which has failed. This likely resulted in the deaths of far more than 15 preborn children, as most IVF cycles create more than one embryo.
READ: Single mom explains her reasons for undergoing IVF… while daughter yearns for a ‘daddy’
“In the last few months, we’ve had to have that conversation like, ‘At what point do we stop? At what point do we just say it’s OK for us to not have a family?'” Steph said. “The question is still unanswered. We don’t know at what point we’re going to stop, but we know that it’s not going to be too far down the road. We’re not going to go through this for another three years.”
One of the problems with IVF is that it involves the purposeful creation of embryos, which are — despite their tiny size — human beings. And those human beings are routinely destroyed, because they aren’t “high quality” embryos, or because they might have a genetic abnormality like Down syndrome, or even because an IVF round failed. Yet this couple’s only regret seems to be monetary cost, not the lives lost.
“If we could have seen into the future and seen how much money we would have poured into it, we probably would have gone down a different avenue,” Steph said. “We probably could have adopted a child from overseas and the amount of money we spent on IVF, and we would have been just as happy doing so.”
Adoption can be expensive; however, in this couple’s home country of Australia, it is significantly less expensive than IVF. A child can be adopted without untold numbers of their brothers and sisters being killed along the way, and a child ideally deserves a mother and a father. Yet societally, children have been turned into not a privilege, a life with whom adults are entrusted, but a right that people deserve to obtain by any means. Rather than being acknowledged as human beings with their own rights and value, children have been turned into products to be engineered, created, and even disposed of at will.
Though the desire to become parents is often quite strong, children are not possessions to be bought or created at will, at times deliberately depriving them of the knowledge and presence of a biological parent.
