Fertility charity defends running IVF lottery game

THE founder of a British charity that offers support to childless couples and people struggling to start a family has defended a new lottery game which offers a prize of €28,000 in fertility treatments.

Camille Strachan, of the To Hatch charity, said the new lottery would help people who cannot afford to attend private fertility treatment clinics in areas where IVF has been axed from the British National Health Service (NHS).

“The cuts in the NHS are going to get worse, not better, and every month that goes by is a problem for somebody who is hoping to conceive. I know because I have been through it myself,” she said. “If I didn’t think this was right, I wouldn’t have launched it.”

The game will launch on July 30 with each £20 (€22.35) ticket offering a chance to win £25,000 of fertility treatment from a choice of five private clinics.

Single people and gay people will be eligible for the lottery along with couples hoping to conceive, Ms Strachan said.

She said there would be no bar on age as long as a winner fulfilled clinical guidelines.

The money will be used to pay for one cycle of IVF along with complementary therapy, accommodation and travel costs.

Where IVF is not suitable, winners could be offered donor eggs, reproductive surgery or surrogate birth.

If a single man or woman won, they could be provided with donor sperm, or a surrogate mother and donor embryo.

Josephine Quintavalle, of the group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, described the development as “horrifying”.

“The more one looks at it, the more one is horrified,” she said.

“If you look at the claims that are being made, if you won and you were not eligible for IVF, they will offer surrogate motherhood, embryos and eggs, so they are actually involving other parties as well. I do not see how they could have got this past the Gambling Commission.”

She said she backed the idea of tackling infertility in Britain through awareness campaigns about the impact of age, nutrition and weight on the chances of conceiving.

A British Gambling Commission spokesman said: “We have licensed them. We don’t comment on individual cases but in terms of the licence, obviously they have met all our requirements in terms of the conditions for a society lottery.”