UK: Violence Against Women and Girls

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, with respect to my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, I am not a noble sister, but I hope I can add to this debate as a male.

Let me tell the story of Marie—a completely true story which I heard recently, perhaps a month or two ago. She had visited a famous, large IVF clinic as a private patient to get an MOT to test for fertility. She was offered an AMH, which is a blood test, and a scan. According to the people who manufacture the AMH test, it does not in fact predict your fertility. None the less, this was sold to her, together with the scan. When her results were handed to her after the tests were done, the female doctor said: “You see these results? These are shit. You have no chance of getting pregnant”. This was said to a woman of roughly 40, acutely concerned about her fertility for lots of reasons, as many women are, who suddenly found this violent language in front of her. It is not uncommon; it happens a lot. I have heard so many stories like this one. As a result of my website, trying to sort out the issue of egg freezing, I get letters of this sort once a week and sometimes daily. Marie was then told that, if she paid £20,000 straight away, she could book three cycles of IVF to have her eggs frozen, and that the chances of her getting pregnant would be very high indeed—probably greater than 50%.

It so happens that, as a kind of hobby, I regularly submit a Written Question—about every three years—to find out the results of egg freezing in the United Kingdom compared to those internationally. According to the latest results from the five years up to the pandemic, 75,958 eggs were subjected to thawing after freezing. Of these—I will round up the figures for speed—13,000 thawed, 11,400 were fertilised, 7,257 produced an embryo, 1,695 were considered suitable for an embryo transfer, 288 of the women got pregnant after transfer, 205 gave birth, and 80 pregnancies were lost as a result of miscarriage. In spite of the HFEA saying on its website that the effects are improving, when you look at these figures in detail you see that they are not.

Only last week, on BBC radio, a well-known individual who was a senior member of the HFEA said that the success rate of egg freezing is 18%. It is nothing like that. In fact, according to the figures I have just given the House, less than 0.2% of eggs that are subjected to thawing result in a live birth, and only 1.7% of eggs that are fertilised become a baby. Women do not want miscarriages, and if there is any violence that you can talk about, having a miscarriage is certainly one of them. It is really quite shocking that this goes on and that this kind of information is bandied around in this way. It is not acceptable, and it needs to be done much more carefully by the Government, because the Government are responsible for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. It needs to make certain that the website says what the success rate is. It does not say what the success rate is; it just says it is improving.

Moreover, the website says that egg freezing is completely safe. How can we say that? It has been going for only 20 years, and it will be a long time before these children can be followed up as adults. It probably is safe but we do not know that. The high miscarriage rate is one certain concern that I have. Clinics are telling patients—I hear this again and again—that if you come to the clinic you have a 60% chance of having your eggs frozen, with a successful baby afterwards. This is a scandal, and it needs to be halted and taken under control.