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It's from here to paternity as smoker swaps habit for baby

Rachel Devine's infertility problems disappeared in a puff of smoke after her husband James gave up cigarettes to boost his chances of becoming a father. The self-employed electrician was warned by a specialist that his 30-a-day £45-a-week habit was ruining the Rotherham couple's chances of parenthood.

Desperate to be a father after three fruitless years of trying, Mr Devine tossed his lighter in the bin, enrolled on an NHS anti-smoking course and took to wearing nicotine patches straight away.

Mrs Devine found out she was expecting just eight weeks later – and now the couple are celebrating the arrival of baby Ben at Rotherham District General Hospital.

Mrs Devine paid tribute to her other half yesterday for beating the weed and coming up trumps in the paternity stakes.

The florist, 29, said: "I'm just grateful that James listened to the specialist and did the right thing – if he hadn't then Ben probably wouldn't be here now.

"I'd been nagging him to stop smoking for ages and ages, and he'd manage it for two or three weeks, then he'd slip back to his old ways.

"I didn't imagine he'd ever really give up, but everything changed once the specialist spelled out how it was damaging our chances of having a baby."

Mr Devine signed up for the anti smoking course within minutes of leaving the specialist's office at the hospital.

Mrs Devine added: "We'd been having tests and treatment for 16 months when the specialist asked James about his smoking.

"We'd not given it a thought till then, but the specialist said there was every chance that the cigarettes were damaging James's sperm count."

Mr Devine, 31, has no intention of lighting up ever again. "I hope other smokers take notice of what happened to us. It's not been easy, but I only have to look at Ben to know it was all worthwhile.

"I'll never pick up another packet of cigarettes again – apart from the cost, I want to be around to see Ben grow up."

Women are risking their lives to have IVF babies

Women are risking death and bankruptcy in their desperation to become mothers, according to Professor Sammy Lee, one of the country's leading experts on infertility.

Some couples going through fertility treatment are driven by an urge "stronger than addiction and more powerful than obsession", said Lee, who pioneered egg donation in the UK when he was chief scientist of the IVF programme at Wellington Hospital, London.

"The quest to have children can become a vortex that gets faster and faster and sucks people in. Women will sell everything and anything to have the treatment if they are short of funds. They will risk their lives, there's no doubt about it," said Lee, who will discuss the issue on Friday when he chairs a major conference, Motherhood in the 21st Century, at University College, London.

"I have treated young women with cancer who have refused to have treatment for their illness until they have got pregnant and given birth, knowing they are risking their lives," added Lee, who has helped some couples through 12 cycles of IVF. The maximum number of treatments provided on the NHS is three. "Some of these women do, indeed, go on to die [from the cancer], but they die happy, feeling that they have achieved something greater than their own continued existence."

He admitted that the determination of couples to have children can lead to clinicians continuing treatment when they know there is little chance of success. "Everyone involved in these scenarios is trying to do the right thing, but the extraordinary energy of a couple's determination creates a vicious circle.

"The advances of science seem to promise women everlasting hope, which means they put ever more trust and hope in the doctors.

"Clinicians, such as myself, should refuse to treat these couples because further treatment is highly unlikely to work, but after helping that couple through three IVF attempts, you can get too pulled in to insist that enough is enough. This is how couples become implicit in their own abuse. Even if you do tell them you will no longer help them, they often just go and get treatment across the street," Lee added. "Then when they get too old to be treated in this country, they go abroad. That makes them vulnerable to yet more abuse, although again, it is abuse in which they are complicit.

"These are often professional, streetwise women who know the physical, mental and financial dangers, but who are prepared to take any risk if it offers even a sliver of hope they might end up with a baby."

Infertility affects about one in seven couples – approximately 3.5 million people. Most of the women will eventually become pregnant naturally, but a significant minority will not. At least 44,000 a year undergo IVF treatment , with about 11,000 IVF babies born every year.

Rebecca Frayn, a film-maker, screenwriter and novelist, has spoken of her fears when she chose to go through IVF. "Couples undergoing IVF are set on achieving a baby at any cost, often developing a kind of wilful moral myopia about the risks in order to avoid being deflected from their goal. I know, because it happened to me," she said. "I had questions about the cancer scares associated with all the hormones I would be required to ingest.

"Liz Tilberis and Ruth Picardie, both journalists who died respectively of ovarian and breast cancer after many rounds of IVF, believed their treatment had caused and accelerated their cancers, respectively," she added. "To attempt to achieve life at the potential expense of one's own [health] is self-evidently sobering. Yet, even then, I somehow squared what I was contemplating doing with my conscience. I was in the iron grip of procreation fever."

Dr Mark Hamilton, consultant gynaecologist at Aberdeen Maternity Hospital, has treated couples who insisted on having up to 10 attempts. "The number of cycles people are prepared to have has increased in the last few years," he said.

But Dr Tony Rutherford, chairman of the British Fertility Society, said that for some patients it was necessary to exhaust all possible options. "I have patients who undergo treatment even though I've counselled them that their chance of success is less than 5%," he said.

"I also counsel couples for whom the chance of experiencing complications through IVF is equal to their chance of success, or for whom being pregnant would be very dangerous. But for many couples having the treatment becomes key in their ability to reach closure."

Warning: Baby lust can be fatal!

This week readers of the U.K. Guardian might be forgiven for thinking that baby lust has exceeded all reasonable bounds and quite possibly become a sociopathic condition. Two articles, within two days of one another, featured women for whom motherhood is quite literally a life or death proposition: The first, titled “Women Who Kill for Babies,” reviewed the cases of women who have murdered pregnant women, then stolen their fetuses from their wombs. The second, about women who risk their own lives in pursuit of an IVF pregnancy, claims that “women are risking death and bankruptcy in their desperation to become mothers.” Taken together, the two nearly scream out that we have reached the apex of the modern motherhood fetish: Dear God, women are killing and dying for babies!

But while packaged as trend stories, both pieces seem to depict situations best described as lurking on the very far margins of human behavior. The womb-robbing story, written by Diane Taylor, is in response to the recent appeal in the case of a British woman, Linda Carty, who is on death row in Texas after being convicted of abducting and murdering a young woman to steal her newborn baby. Yes, the details are grisly, as they are in most homicides. But while admitting that these cases are extremely rare, Taylor goes on to claim they seem to be a wholly modern phenomenon -- “unheard of before 1987.” How rare? Well, since 1987, Taylor can find only 13 recorded cases, 12 of which took place in the United States. Not having access to a database that compiles worldwide local crime reports over the past century -- perhaps Taylor does? -- I’m not at liberty to offer up any factual contradictions to her claim. But I would hazard to guess that, like most statistically rare, yet sensationalistic crimes -- stranger abductions, molestation, daycare Satanic panic scares -- the ones that make headlines tell us more about the current preoccupations of the day than they do about the actual crime rate (which may explain why only one country -- us -- got caught up in reporting on baby-theft homicides. Or maybe I’m totally wrong and we Americans have made yet another contribution to crimes never before seen in nature, to go along with fanny packs and wearing socks with sandals). Even so, 13 cases in 23 years -- during which time many pregnant women were killed by their partners, mothers killed their children, and strangers kidnapped already born children -- sounds pretty low to me. And I’m even more bothered by the fact that Taylor’s “expert,” Philip Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western University, seems to blur the line between demonstrably criminal behavior and just plain old baby lust. “I have been involved in three cases, and none of the women was psychotic,” he says. “They are women who want a baby very badly.”

In the next article, women who want a baby very, very badly and thus pursue IVF are described as being driven by an urge “stronger than addiction and more powerful than obsession,” according to professor Sammy Lee, one of the early pioneers of egg donation in the United Kingdom, who goes on to tell the Guardian: “The quest to have children can become a vortex that gets faster and faster and sucks people in. Women will sell everything and do anything to have the treatment if they are short on funds. They will risk their lives, there’s no doubt about it.” He then goes on to liken couples who get “addicted” to IVF cycles to the cycle of abuse, and says, “When they get too old to get treated in this country, they go abroad. That makes them vulnerable to yet more abuse, though again, it’s abuse in which they are already complicit.”

How exactly are these women abusing themselves in pursuit of a baby? Well, in this case Lee is talking once again about a very, very tiny subset of women: those who refuse cancer drugs in order to undergo fertility treatment. "Some of these women do, indeed, go on to die [from the cancer], but they die happy, feeling that they have achieved something greater than their own continued existence." But the ethical guidelines printed in just about every IVF treatment center tell you that doctors will not start IVF treatment in former cancer patients until the woman’s condition has stabilized. But we’re not yet done. The article then goes on to suggest that women who use IVF knowingly expose themselves to cancer-causing hormones, but decide -- what the hell? -- a baby is worth dying for. Rebecca Frayn, a filmmaker and novelist who underwent IVF, claims that she was freaked out by the “cancer scares” associated with the hormones she ingested, but was so consumed with wanting a kid, she developed a “moral myopia” about the risks. She then goes even further, essentially claiming that two women she knows were killed by fertility drugs: “Liz Tilberis and Ruth Picardie, both journalists who died respectively of ovarian and breast cancer after many rounds of IVF, believed their treatment had caused and accelerated their cancers, respectively. To attempt to achieve life at the potential expense of one's own [health] is self-evidently sobering. Yet, even then, I somehow squared what I was contemplating doing with my conscience. I was in the iron grip of procreation fever."

Whether or not she’s a victim of procreation fever, Frayn is not an oncologist, and hardly qualified to diagnose what may have contributed to another woman’s cancer. While some researchers have speculated on a link between fertility drugs and cancer, the latest research seems to suggest that women who undergo IVF are no more likely to develop breast or ovarian cancer than any other woman. Anyone looking to write a story about those who defy death while pursuing cancer-causing activities could do much better with “Teens still bake in tanning beds!” Or: “Twenty-five-year-old dudes smoke Camel straights!”

So why whip readers into a hysterical frenzy about those who seem to have a death wish to produce life? Most women who have undergone fertility treatments will concede that they are pretty keen on having a baby, but I would guess you’d have to search pretty hard to find anyone who was willing to kill or die for a baby. The Guardian may have had the good fortune to find a few of both within days of one another (though I’m still not convinced their IVF story succeeded in introducing us to an actual woman who actually died from IVF). But let’s at least have the good grace to label those who would as what they are: statistical outliers, not some harbinger of the next trend to come.

― Amy Benfer