Quebec's Fertility Program celebrates second birthday
Every week, hundreds of couples visit the McGill Reproductive Center hoping to fulfill their dearest wish: to finally become parents. It’s often a last-ditch effort to conceive after a long struggle to do so naturally, but even here there are no guarantees. Fertility treatment is taxing both physically and emotionally, but at least in many cases it’s no longer financially draining as well.
In August 2010, the Quebec government became the first in Canada to subsidize In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) treatments. Infertile Quebec couples now receive up to three cycles of government-funded IVF, instead of having to pay up to $15,000 each time. “The program should really serve as a model for the rest of the country,” says Dr. Hananel Holzer, Medical Director of the McGill Reproductive Centre,based at the Royal Victoria Hospital. “It’s a great success already.”
The number of cycles at the centre has more than doubled to 2,000 per year, yet the success rate has actually dropped by a few percent. That’s largely due to new regulation that limits the number of embryos per treatment cycle, in an effort to reduce the number of multiple births. As a result, the number of multiples has dropped by 20 per cent, which, which according to Dr. Holzer will eventually amount to savings for the healthcare system. “That was the downside of IVF prior to the government subsidized program,” he says. “Couples like the idea of twins or triplets, but they forget there is a far greater risk of premature birth and babies with health problems, which is very costly to the system.”
Parenthood After Cancer
One of the aspects of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) program Dr. Holzeris most proud of is subsidized fertility preservation for patients battling cancer. Before patients undergo cancer treatments that could potentially leave them infertile, Quebec now pays for their sperm or eggs and embryos to be frozen. “They’re often young people who just cannot afford fertility preservation,” he says. “It’s wonderful to give them the opportunity to become parents in the future.”
The next step at the McGill Reproductive Centre is to undergo a $2 million renovation, which will allow for a greater number of treatments, and eventually more births. Quebec’s goal is for the province’s public and private clinics to perform 7,000 IVF cycles by 2014.
Quebecers may now have better access to fertility treatment, but the odds of carrying a pregnancy to term remains the same: Women under the age of 35 have a 50 percent chance of giving birth, but those odds drop to 5 percent by the time they reach 42, something Dr. Holzer says couples need to be more aware of. “For years the focus has been on career first, family later, but we need to get the word out that Mother Nature doesn’t work that way. It’s something we need to think about as a society.”