Have you noticed them? Twins, I mean. They are everywhere: in shopping malls, on sidewalks, in parks. It has become practically impossible to dodge those double-capacity buggies as they roll towards you, pushed (usually) by a well-heeled, older mum. Where once twins were rather rare, they have suddenly become as commonplace as 'Bob the Builder' merchandise. Why this sudden increase?
IVF - the treatment, used by about 27,000 women in Britain - often results in multiple pregnancies. To maximise the chances of pregnancy - especially among older women - many doctors will implant as many as four or five embryos in the womb. This is despite the fact that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) last year recommended that only two embryos be implanted in a woman.
Hence the frequent sightings of sweet toddlers in matching little outfits. And, according to Suzi Leather, the new head of the HFEA, you'll be seeing even more of them. She warned this week that some clinics are hurrying women into trying fertility treatments after only a few months of trying to conceive naturally. Even worse, there are GPs out there who collude in this. Upon hearing a 29-year-old woman - a friend of mine - remark that she had been off contraception for two years but had not conceived, her GP promptly packed her off to get 'advice' from a fertility expert. My poor friend is going to be pumped with hormones and fertility drugs - risking, according to studies, depression, ovarian cancer, premature menopause. She's going to be under observation and, as a consequence, tremendous stress every time she holds up one of those little plastic dips that come with a Boots pregnancy tester. And for the chance of being the lucky one-in-six IVF success stories, she's going to pay through the nose.
IVF is big business. A cycle of treatment can set you back on average £2,000 - and most women need more than one cycle to get pregnant. About 43,000 couples seek fertility treatment from the 120 licensed clinics around the country. Given that less than 10 per cent of these couples will get their treatment on the NHS - whether you qualify for this depends on where you live - our baby hunger is raking in big bucks for those experts who promise they'll deliver your very own child.
Your. Very. Own. Child. Those words send a current of electricity coursing through the veins of the woman who's waited until her late thirties (or later still) to have a child; and through the 30,000 women who, each year, face difficulties in conceiving. They fill with hope the couples who don't want to play the roulette game of adoption - particularly those who believe that genes determine character-formation and are wary of taking to the bosom of their family some stranger with an unknown gene pool predisposing him or her to violence, criminality or just stupidity.
Promise someone their very own child and you will be articulating not only their desire (in almost every case) but also what many regard as their right. I am entitled to a baby: for many men and women, their obsession with procreation is so overwhelming that 'want' becomes need. Yet, as Mary Warnock argues in Making Babies, procreation is not a basic need like nutrition or water. Many individuals do pretty well without making babies.
And yet. Look at the premium society places on parenthood: every little girl is still taught that one day she will be a mum (less frequently, little boys are told they will one day be dads); traditionalists still hold up the nuclear family as the essential building-block for a good society; the Government gives parents tax cuts and tax incentives. And the question - what is a woman who is not a mother? - remains pertinent today. Isn't that what Nature designed our bodies for? (Somehow, the question of what good is the man who is not a father seems to be posed far less.)
No wonder the richest doctor in Britain is Dr Ian Carr, the IVF guru; that fertility clinics are mushrooming all over the country; and that 'league tables' showing the live birth rates for each clinic (the latest was published on Friday) are seized upon by anxious couples with the same alacrity with which they will (hopefully) seize upon school league tables to decide where they will send junior. People want so badly for IVF to work that they're prepared to overlook the possibility of errors that, given the mess of the procedure - all those eggs, dishes, sperms, labels - is pretty high. When a white couple conceived a black baby earlier this summer, several IVF experts blew the whistle on the increasing number of similar errors - but the patients keep coming, more and more each year.
Last month, while filming a piece on IVF for Newsnight, I paid a visit to Dr Carr's Harley Street Clinic. I am 41, I told him. What were my chances of getting pregnant? 'Slim,' he said; with IVF, they would be 5-6 per cent. Soon, in fact, IVF would be my only option. For a moment, I felt the urge to switch off the tape recorder and pull out my cheque book and pledge any amount he named in order to buy motherhood. And then I regained my senses: the drugs, the hormones, the stress - even if IVF were my only option, it comes at too high a price.
· Cristina Odone is deputy editor of the New Statesman
