Nobody's Child, Everybody's Children:

Looking Back, Looking Forward:  A View from the Trenches

In 1990, a small group of women came together in Toronto to start an infertility self-help support group. Most were looking for information to cope with their own sense of devastating loss; some already had children through assisted reproductive technologies and wanted to help others feel less alone and better informed than they had been. This was in the days before the internet and there were few resources available even in such a large metropolitan area.

Since that first meeting, the Infertility Network (IN) has become a registered charity; held more than 70 educational seminars; sponsored several international conferences; run a support group once a month for 15 years; developed an extensive network of contacts with other organizations, professionals, agencies, etc., both in Canada and abroad; taken part in numerous consultations held by Health Canada with various stakeholder groups; made presentations to parliamentary committees reviewing legislative proposals; and provided support and referral to more than 50,000 Canadians by means of information kits, taped seminars, books, newsletters, telephone and email.

This presentation will explore some of the challenges the Infertility Network has encountered, as well as what it has learned along the way – about infertility; the dilemmas faced by the people IN tries to help; the lack of long term research into the effects of fertility treatments and medications; the lifelong consequences for all parties when donor gametes are used to build families; the shift towards patients being seen as ‘consumers’ and access to treatment as a ‘reproductive right’; the conflicting views about legislation and regulation; the impact of the Canadian Assisted Human Reproduction Act; the need for governments to fund more treatment under medicare while also undertaking serious initiatives to reduce the incidence of infertility; the potential impact of new technologies looming on the horizon; and the unseen motives and agendas operating behind the scenes in this multi-million dollar, largely private for-profit field of medicine.