PET PET
  • My Account
  • Subscribe
Become a Friend Donate
  • About Us
    • People
    • Press Office
    • Our History
  • Get Involved
    • Become a Friend of PET
    • Volunteer
    • Campaigns
    • Writing Scheme
    • Partnership and Sponsorship
    • Advertise with Us
  • Donate
    • Become a Friend of PET
  • BioNews
    • News
    • Comment
    • Reviews
    • Elsewhere
    • Topics
    • Glossary
    • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Previous Events
  • Engagement
    • Policy and Projects
      • Resources
    • Education
  • Jobs & Opportunities
  • Contact Us
  • About Us
    • People
    • Press Office
    • Our History
  • Get Involved
    • Become a Friend of PET
    • Volunteer
    • Campaigns
    • Writing Scheme
    • Partnership and Sponsorship
    • Advertise with Us
  • Donate
    • Become a Friend of PET
  • BioNews
    • News
    • Comment
    • Reviews
    • Elsewhere
    • Topics
    • Glossary
    • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Previous Events
  • Engagement
    • Policy and Projects
      • Resources
    • Education
  • Jobs & Opportunities
  • Contact Us
  • My Account
  • Subscribe
  • Privacy Statement
  • Advertising Policy
  • Thanks and Acknowledgements
PETBioNewsCommentThe Age-Old Question: The Impact of Age

BioNews

The Age-Old Question: The Impact of Age

Published 17 December 2012 posted in Comment and appears in BioNews 687

Author

Ruth Saunders

Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
CC0 1.0
Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.

Progress Educational Trust's 2012 annual conference 'Fertility Treatment: A Life-Changing Event?' concluded with a session entitled 'The Age-Old Question: The Impact of Age'...

The Progress Educational Trust's (PET) 2012 annual conference 'Fertility Treatment: A Life-Changing Event?' concluded with a session entitled 'The Age-Old Question: The Impact of Age'.

Professor Susan Bewley began the discussion by asking the question: 'Who Benefits From Women Becoming Unfit to Reproduce?' The answer: the industry which profits when it can do nothing to change the biological reality. The biological reality is, Bewley posited, that female reproductive health decreases with age. Gynaecological complications such as pre-eclampsia and stillbirth, on the other hand, increase.

Lamenting Department of Health figures which show an increase in women over the ages of 35 and 40 giving birth, Professor Bewley stressed that although humans are living longer, the age of reproduction and menopause is not changing. IVF doesn't solve the delay — it perhaps compensates for about 35 percent of the reproductive health of women between the ages of 35-40. Bewley regarded this as a public health issue, and asked: how does society help these women?

Sex education focuses on teaching girls how to have safe sex, but doesn't teach them that they're more likely to become infertile than they are to conceive. Professor Bewley argued that secondary school girls and girls in their twenties should also be informed that spontaneous abortions increase with age. If girls were well-informed in their twenties, she asked, would they still decide to have children at a later age?

Next, Louisa Ghevaert asked 'What's Age Got To Do with It?'. Ghevaert discussed the postcode lottery which dominates access to IVF treatment in England and Wales. Although NICE, National
Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, recommends that three cycles of IVF should be available on the NHS, only 27 percent of IVF centres offer two cycles. Age, Ghevaert notes, is used to limit access to IVF services and as a budgetary limitation to cut costs.

She gave two examples of how age is used to discriminate in the provision of IVF services. The first concerned Andrea Heywood who, at the age of 24, failed to meet the minimum age requirement of 30, set by the guidelines of her local Primary Care Trust (PCT). Ghevaert argued that PCTs use age to set arbitrary, unfair and discriminatory standards.

The second case was that of Donna Marshall, who was initially considered too young when her PCT set the age requirements at 35-39, and too old when the policy was later changed to the age range of 30-34. In response to the effect of these policies, NICE has proposed to remove the lower age limit and increase the maximum age to 42.

Ghevaert considered the discriminatory effect of PCT governance in light of a new legal landscape. She reminded us that the Equality Act 2010 bans direct and indirect discrimination on the basis of age, and that this specifically includes the provision of healthcare. However it comes with a massive proviso, which Ghevaert believed could be used by PCTs to maintain their current practice. Similarly, the standards of equality in the Public Sector Equality Duty can be evaded by public bodies where they see fit.

There is a glimmer of light: the burden of proof in the Equality Act has been removed so that the court must assume that a breach of equality took place, unless a contradictory account can be shown. That said, Ghevaert believed that IVF services are likely to become more fragmented under the new GP-led commissioning services, and that the only solution to the age problem is a centralised policy.

Finally, Dr Gillian Lockwood took to the stage to present 'Past Their Sell-By Date? Fertility Implications of Deferred Motherhood', which examined the implications of women postponing childbirth.

The average age of childbirth in the UK is now 29, higher than it has been previously. Lockwood discussed the experiences of countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where there are state-led incentives to encourage earlier childbirth, but women are still putting off having a baby.

As Lockwood boldly put it, half of graduates will be childless at 45 because they started to have children too late, in an attempt to postpone until it was the right time to have a baby. In a similar vein to Bewley, Lockwood argued that women 'can't botox their ovaries'.

Lockwood touched on the potential for women to routinely freeze their eggs at a young age, when healthy, for future use. They could then search for 'the one' while their eggs waited safely in the freezer.

However, this isn't without consequences. Lockwood argued that deferred motherhood leads to a significant generation gap and a population of lonely, only children - a pattern which is likely to repeat itself in subsequent generations. Social consequences aside, so-called 'social' egg freezing is not covered by the NHS and can be prohibitively expensive, at around £3,000 to 4,000.

Ultimately, Lockwood acknowledged, it's difficult to get women to want babies when their age says that they can, despite various governments encouraging them to do just that.

Several interesting comments from the floor followed, including a particular concern about the social and financial burden of childrearing, which can take precedent over biological reality. Ghevaert highlighted the need for better family-friendly working hours, to encourage members of a more squeezed younger generation who are struggling (for example) to get a mortgage.

Another audience member asked whether the NHS should be offering a routine AMH (Anti-Müllerian hormone) test to determine egg health. Dr Lockwood highlighted the clinical limitations of the test, and its limited usefulness in informing women whether they should have a child 'now or never'. Professor Bewley saw this idea as an opportunity for the industry to profit, rather than provide any real benefit.

The session provided a very topical and informative discussion, enjoyed by all. Last, but definitely not least!

PET is grateful to the conference's gold
sponsors, Merck Serono, silver sponsors London Women's Clinic and bronze
sponsors Ferring Pharmaceuticals.

Related Articles

Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts equipment used for embryo biopsy.
CC0 1.0
Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts equipment used for embryo biopsy.
Reviews
9 March 2015 • 4 minutes read

Event Review: Does egg-freezing enable women to 'have it all'?

by Dr Rachel Montgomery

I arrived with some bemusement at this one-hour debate, 'Does egg-freezing enable women to "have it all"', to Beyoncé playing out loudly to an excited lecture theatre...

Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
CC0 1.0
Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
News
15 February 2013 • 2 minutes read

Reduced DNA egg repair may explain age-related fertility fall-off

by Yick Siew Tan

A slowdown in DNA repair mechanisms, one of which involves the BRCA genes implicated in cancer, may partly explain why women's eggs rapidly decline in both quantity and quality in middle age...

Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
CC0 1.0
Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
Comment
21 January 2013 • 3 minutes read

Donor conception in the UK: the seldom-heard voices of minority ethnic communities

by Professor Nicky Hudson and 1 others

When we set out over ten years ago to carry out research about infertility within British South Asian communities, little was known about how involuntary childlessness and its possible resolution with assisted conception was experienced by members of minority ethnic communities in the UK...

Image by Peter Artymiuk via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts the shadow of a DNA double helix, on a background that shows the fluorescent banding of the output from a DNA sequencing machine.
CC BY 4.0
Image by Peter Artymiuk via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts the shadow of a DNA double helix, on a background that shows the fluorescent banding of the sequencing output from an automated DNA sequencing machine.
Comment
10 December 2012 • 4 minutes read

Weighing up your options: the impact of weight and nutrition

by Rachel Lloyd

I had a front row seat for session three of Progress Educational Trust's 2012 annual conference 'Fertility Treatment: A life-changing event?'.
This session was entitled 'Weighing up your options: The impact of weight and nutrition'...

Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
CC0 1.0
Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
Comment
29 January 2010 • 3 minutes read

Time to put a stop to postmenopausal mothers?

by Dr Anna Smajdor

When Liz Buttle (then aged 60) became the UK's oldest mother in 1997, she was subjected to a storm of media criticism. Since then, debate over appropriate age limits for fertility treatment has shown no signs of abatement, while a growing number of postmenopausal women seek treatment in the UK and abroad....

Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
CC0 1.0
Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
News
18 January 2010 • 2 minutes read

Woman, 59, wanted second IVF baby

by Dr Vivienne Raper

A 59-year-old British woman who conceived her two-year-old daughter by in IVF (vitro fertilisation) has faced criticism after saying she wants more children. Sue Tollefsen, from Essex, had told makers of a BBC documentary about older mothers to be shown later this month that she was '110 per cent' sure she wanted more treatment....

Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
CC0 1.0
Image by Alan Handyside via the Wellcome Collection. Depicts a human egg soon after fertilisation, with the two parental pronuclei clearly visible.
Comment
19 October 2009 • 6 minutes read

'Older Mothers': a report on the '21st century motherhood’ conference held at UCL, 18 September 2009

by Dr Antony Starza-Allen

Maria Bousada, 69, once the world's oldest mother, died in July this year leaving behind two young children born following IVF only two years earlier. Her death reignited the debate surrounding 'older mothers' - or more specifically, post-menopausal women who require fertility treatment to conceive. In response to media attention surrounding Ms Bousada's death, Professor Sammy Lee, an expert in medical ethics, embryology and biomedical sciences based at University College London...

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

« German Brüstle decision puts spotlight on national patent guidelines

Data-Label The UK's Leading Supplier Of Medical Labels & Asset Labels

RetiringDentist.co.uk The UK's Leading M&A Company.

Find out how you can advertise here
easyfundraising
amazon

This month in BioNews

  • Popular
  • Recent
8 August 2022 • 2 minutes read

FILM: 200 Years of Mendel – From Peas to Personalised Medicine

1 August 2022 • 4 minutes read

Women's Health Strategy plans reflect rising needs of same-sex female couples

25 July 2022 • 4 minutes read

Was the Women's Health Strategy worth the wait?

25 July 2022 • 4 minutes read

Why the UK should extend the 14-day rule to 28 days

25 July 2022 • 5 minutes read

200 Years of Mendel: From Peas to Personalised Medicine

8 August 2022 • 4 minutes read

Citizenship and same-sex parents – about time, Sweden!

8 August 2022 • 2 minutes read

FILM: 200 Years of Mendel – From Peas to Personalised Medicine

1 August 2022 • 4 minutes read

Women's Health Strategy plans reflect rising needs of same-sex female couples

25 July 2022 • 4 minutes read

Was the Women's Health Strategy worth the wait?

25 July 2022 • 4 minutes read

Why the UK should extend the 14-day rule to 28 days

Subscribe to BioNews and other PET updates for free.

Subscribe
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • RSS
Wellcome
Website redevelopment supported by Wellcome.

Website by Impact Media Impact Media

  • Privacy Statement
  • Advertising Policy
  • Thanks and Acknowledgements

© 1992 - 2022 Progress Educational Trust. All rights reserved.

Limited company registered in England and Wales no 07405980 • Registered charity no 1139856

Subscribe to BioNews and other PET updates for free.

Subscribe
PET PET

PET is an independent charity that improves choices for people affected by infertility and genetic conditions.

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • RSS
Wellcome
Website redevelopment supported by Wellcome.

Navigation

  • About Us
  • Get Involved
  • Donate
  • BioNews
  • Events
  • Engagement
  • Jobs & Opportunities
  • Contact Us

BioNews

  • News
  • Comment
  • Reviews
  • Elsewhere
  • Topics
  • Glossary
  • Newsletters

Other

  • My Account
  • Subscribe

Website by Impact Media Impact Media

  • Privacy Statement
  • Advertising Policy
  • Thanks and Acknowledgements

© 1992 - 2022 Progress Educational Trust. All rights reserved.

Limited company registered in England and Wales no 07405980 • Registered charity no 1139856