This could be up to £3,000 or so for the embryo transfer or around £7,500 for a donor egg cycle (covering the donor's egg collection bills as well as buying the eggs).
Boxes of drugs can cost £800 a time. There will always be someone from the fertility clinic phoning the day before a consultation or scan asking for payment upfront, even if the in-person clinic visit has to be cancelled as a result of extraneous factors – Covid-19 being a prime example.
Most families do not have this kind of cash lying around and few will be prepared to liquidate stocks-and-shares Isa savings to do so. So it will help to create a budget.
But what about insurance providers themselves? Surely those monthly premiums your clients pay must come into play at some point, right? Wrong.
A medical issue
The World Health Organization and the NHS have stated that infertility is a medical issue. However, it does not appear among the lists of conditions covered by the majority of protection policies.
Emma Walker, chief marketing officer at LifeSearch, notes: “There is little reference to infertility or IVF in any protection policy that we are aware of."
Given that infertility is stated to be a medical problem, why is it not covered by insurance on most insurance policies?
Charlotte Gentry, founder of The IVF Network, comments: "On top of the cost of my egg-retrieval and IVF treatments, I spent approximately £1,500 trying to get advice from a diverse set of opinions.
"This great expense is accrued due to many health insurers refusing to pay out for fertility treatments due to them deeming it a ‘lifestyle choice’.
"Unfortunately, this view is not uncommon and the majority of workplace employee protection policies share ‘elective’ medical processes, putting fertility treatment on a par with cosmetic surgery."
Kathryn Knowles, co-founder of Cura Financial Services, says it is mostly because of the nature of the condition – although there may be a historical element to the way in which policies were created and underwritten in the past.
She says: "It could be because men didn’t want to talk about hoo-hahs and what goes on 'down there', or face the reality that some men aren’t virile. I think ultimately it comes down to people thinking that infertility is not as bad as other conditions.
"I would guess that some people would think that infertility is a sad situation, but not one that is life threatening, that people get over it and adopt [a child instead].
"I think that could be the harsh reality of it. Critical illness contracts do not tend to take into account claims for emotional and mental health, and I imagine that infertility has previously been linked to these areas."
