Grandparents funding IVF

Red Magazine has reported that grandparents are footing the bill for their own children’s IVF. It seems grandparents are willing to fork out for having grandchildren, with 25 per cent of women over 40, and 13 per cent of all couples undergoing fertility treatments, asking their parents to foot the bill. On average, it costs £5,413.

This year, Red estimates that £2.9 billion (as opposed to £1.8 billion in 2007) will go on fertility treatments. Only 17 per cent of women are funded by the NHS, as some areas have an upper age limit of 40 years old and not all hold to the guidelines that offer three attempts. The waiting list is also a major deterrent, being thre years long.

Brigid Moss, health director of Red, said “We couldn’t work out how people were funding it during the recession. We knew readers were turning to their parents more and more for childcare, and we picked up anecdotally that couples were increasingly turning to their parents to help pay for IVF, so we put the question into the research. It is a sizeable proportion,”

IVF success rate has risen: women under 35 have a success rate of 28.2 per cent but those over 40 only stand a 10.6 per cent chance of getting pregnant.

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