Australia: A compassionate call on IVF

Children are one of life's most precious gifts; no parent could put a price on them. Most intending parents at first assume they will be blessed with children, but one in six couples has difficulties in conceiving. Medical advances have enabled some of these couples to have children, but IVF treatment comes at a cost, personal and financial, and success is not guaranteed. Even so, IVF gives couples who long to have children a second chance.

Both government and public understood the significance of this, hence Australia's generous IVF funding. Unsurprisingly, given the numbers of women who delay motherhood - often oblivious to how rapidly fertility falls with age - demand for IVF has grown. The Government's costs jumped from $50 million in 2003 to $79 million last year, when it proposed to set age limits and cap the number of funded IVF cycles. IVF, a tiny part of a $42 billion health budget, was singled out for an austerity campaign.

Since March, Health Minister Tony Abbott has sat on a report that said IVF is not appropriate for older women; the success rate past the age of 44 was less than 2 per cent. Yet when it released the report on Wednesday, the Government relented: funding would remain unrestricted and would be extended to another treatment for male infertility. This is a compassionate decision.

Not all women have a choice about delaying motherhood, for reasons that range from infertility and difficulty in finding the right partner to financial and career insecurity (a more family-friendly society might reduce the need for IVF). An education campaign on age and infertility also makes sense - preventive programs to alert people to potential problems tend to be highly cost-effective. There may be arguments to be had about allocating health resources, but IVF is a special case: nothing is more precious to most Australians than having children.