Fetal attraction to 'fertility tourism'

LONDON - Older British women seeking fertility treatment are having to travel to Europe because they are finding it difficult to get in vitro fertilisation help at home, a study has found.

Hundreds of women from Britain could be going to countries such as Spain, Slovenia and the Czech Republic where it is easier to gain access to IVF treatment, scientists discovered.

The growing trend for "fertility tourism" involves thousands of women crossing European borders each year. Although 80 per cent of German, 70 per cent of Italian and 65 per cent of French women who travelled cited legal restrictions at home, British women were the most likely to cite access difficulties as their main reason.

More than 60 per cent of the women in Britain found to be having IVF treatment in another country are over the age of 40, according to a survey of fertility clinics in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland.

The pilot survey's results, released yesterday by the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology in Amsterdam, were the first to quantify the scale of fertility tourism in Europe.

Each clinic was asked to complete a questionnaire for each patient attending the centre over a month.

Extrapolating the data over Europe, there were between at least 20,000 and 25,000 cycles of IVF treatment each year resulting from women travelling abroad, said Dr Francoise Shenfield of University College London Hospital. Of these, the largest proportion - 32 per cent - were from Italy. Britain was sixth, accounting for nearly 5 per cent of the patients who had travelled abroad for treatment.

- INDEPENDENT