By Cam Lucadou-Wells
Dandenong MP and Minister Gabrielle Williams has told of her “gruelling roller coaster of hope and despair” undergoing IVF in a powerful speech to State Parliament.
On 14 September, Ms Williams commended the Government’s Assisted Reproductive Treatment Amendment Bill 2021 for making IVF more “accessible” and “inclusive”.
Ms Williams is undergoing IVF with an anonymous sperm donor – often the “last stop” after years of attempted conceptions and ART interventions.
IVF was “prohibitively expensive”, “physically gruelling” and “emotionally exhausting”.
“It is a roller-coaster of hope and despair, and it can leave you feeling utterly broken.”
Women already felt “pretty broken” by the time they reached out for fertility support, she said.
After years of treatment, she was left with “multiple chemical pregnancies and multiple failures and a bucket load of pain and despair and anger – so much anger”.
“After one recent loss I remember looking down at my own belly in the shower and hearing these words come out of my mouth like they were someone else’s: ‘What is wrong with you?’, I was saying.
“I was so angry. I was so upset and just so utterly broken and frustrated.”
Ms Williams welcomed the Bill’s proposed changes to donor consent – which means donors can no longer withdraw consent after their eggs or sperm are used in treatment or embyros are created.
“Victoria’s current laws are unusual and deeply unfair on this point.
“As it stands, my donor could withdraw his consent after the embryos are created, which would mean that those embryos, and I have got six of them on ice at the moment, created with his sperm would need to be destroyed.”
After weeks of self-administered hormone injections, clinical fertilization, the transfer of the embryo to the womb and pregnancy tests, the cost outlaid could be $14,000 plus $4000 per transfer.
A fraction of that is redeemed through Medicare.
“Imagine, after the expense and the physical toll of egg collection and the anxiety of seeing how many embryos you are left with at the end of it, if a donor, in my case a person I do not know and have never met, one day calls the clinic and says, ‘I withdraw my consent’.
“That means that I would then get a call telling me that my embryos, my last chances, need to be destroyed.”
The State Government had previously introduced a public fertility care service, an Australian-first public sperm and egg bank and the removal of “draconian and humiliating” police checks and child protection checks for people undergoing IVF.
The new Bill acts on 10 further recommendations from the ART review by Michael Gorton in 2019.
They include reducing discrimination for LGBTIQ families, and allowing doctors outside registered clinics to carry out artificial insemination.
