At 58, Louise B. should be thinking ahead to retirement. Instead, she is struggling to explain to other daycare parents that the two-year-old boy she's bringing in is not a grandchild, but her son.
In a 2012 interview with La Presse, Ms. B proudly described how she bought eggs from a 23-year-old Mexican woman through a Quebec clinic. She looked through a catalogue listing the characteristics of potential foreign donors. One looked "Zen," she said, and so she chose her as the biological mother of her baby.
Ms. B. paid for the eggs (whose "donation" is legal in Mexico, among other countries). The rest of the procedure was free, thanks to a no-limit in vitro fertilization program the government set up in 2010 after an emotional lobbying campaign led by two high-profile personalities, singer Celine Dion and television producer Julie Snyder, who both had their children through IVF.
Quebec got saddled with what was to become one of the most generous assisted-procreation programs in the world. It basically allows any woman with a provincial medicare card to receive up to three consecutive IVF cycles at taxpayer's expense, even if they are perfectly fertile, or post-menopausal, or mentally unstable or surrogates recruited to deliver a baby to a gay couple. The cost of the program exploded. The program had at least one positive result, though: It forbade the implanting of multiple embryos, which often results in premature births and complications.
The "open bar," as Gaétan Barrette, a former head of the Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec, once called the program, is about to close. Mr. Barrette, now Health Minister in a government bent on reducing Quebec's large deficit, is tabling a bill that will drastically curtail public financing of the program.
Applicants who have previously had tubal ligation or a vasectomy, or who already have one child, will pay full price. Before accessing the costly IVF treatment, patients will be required to try artificial insemination and will have to pass a psycho-social assessment. (This last regulation seems intrusive but it addresses previous abuses – some of the babies born under the program have allegedly been abandoned or mistreated.)
Lucky qualifiers will be reimbursed with a tax credit of 20 to 80 per cent of the cost, depending on family income, but only for one embryo implant.
The bill is not discriminatory – lesbian couples and single women will have equal access. The legal status of children born to surrogate mothers is under study at the provincial Justice Ministry.
The most drastic measure is that the law will make it illegal for women over 42 to receive IVF treatment, even if they are willing to pay for the procedure. Physicians will be fined $50,000 for treating women older than that, or even for referring them to clinics outside the province.
For Mr. Barrette, it is a question of public health, since older women have riskier pregnancies and more complicated deliveries, which in turn affect already stressed health services. Indeed, the risks extend to older men, too – recent studies have established a link between over-45 fathers and rates of autism and bipolar disease in children.
Meanwhile, fertility clinic waiting rooms are preparing to be swamped with women trying to enlist before the law takes effect. Next year could see a mini-baby boom in Quebec.
Lysiane Gagnon