It is hard to make jokes about IVF. Not because the procedure isn't funny - pretty much all medical treatments have comedy value, especially ones involving those wriggly corporeal fall guys, spermatozoa - but because, for the people who undertake in vitro fertilisation, it's a horrendously serious business. And horrendously expensive. At the moment the NHS will only offer "up to" three free IVF cycles (and there's a waiting list, as there's not enough eggs and sperm to go round, as the HFEA pointed out this week). After that, it's down to you and your bank balance. At £5,000 a go, with a success rate that is only 31% for women under 35, plunging to around 4% for women over 42, it's the medical equivalent of investing in moon property. But that doesn't stop people like Delina and Simon Tree, who spent £64,000 on IVF over 10 years. They finally had a daughter last year, on their 15th attempt. They had been told they had a 5% chance of conceiving.
Statistically, IVF is well ropey. It's like playing poker when you're prone to giggles. Or marrying Mark "Mr Kerry Katona" Croft. You shouldn't bother because odds are you'll end up very disappointed and very, very skint. But statistics don't tell the whole story. Percentages don't take account of the extremes, of the absolute difference in discovering you fall within one mathematical probability or another. The likelihood of dying in a plane crash is statistically trifling - but when you're plummeting to earth with only Marley & Me to distract you, there's small comfort in knowing that you've upped the survival chances of everyone who booked on the next flight.
IVF's 30% success rate sounds OK. But it's not as if all IVF users end up with a third of a child, as though everyone goes home knowing that, for at least two days a week, they will be parents. Seventy per cent get nothing. Thirty per cent get it all. Thus, despite the stark, incontrovertible numbers, I have no problems with anyone who wishes to cough up for private IVF treatment.
I think it's fine to pay people who donate sperm and eggs, as was suggested this week by the HFEA. Donating either is a serious commitment involving inconvenience, pain and, now donor anonymity has been abolished, the possibility that in 20 years' time you'll be tracked down by a snivelling ingrate who blames you for their rotten life. And so what if people want to go abroad to get treatment? Let them. Only they can know how far they will go - how much they'll spend, how much stress and disappointment they can handle - in order to become a parent.
Baby-making has become so stressful, such a touchy topic, that it's hard to bring it up even among friends. I have mates who have spent their entire savings on unsuccessful IVF and those who don't want children at all. Those who have been making sweet, legs-akimbo, upside-down, sod-your-meeting-we-need-to-do-it-NOW love for two years and those who got up the duff by mistake. I know women who've popped Radiant Wonder and folic acid and special DNA to get pregnant, those who hit the menopause early, and those who haven't yet met someone with whom they'd even consider raising a child.
The thing is, at some point in life, we all try to buck the stats. We've been brought up to believe that, if we're good and kind and we work hard enough, we can get what we want. But luck is just as important as belief. The really difficult part of making a baby - of life, full stop - is having to accept that your body does pretty much as it pleases. Bodies refuse to act according to the personalities that they house. You can be in control of most things - your career, your home, even your love life - but your body goes its own sweet way, getting cellulite, getting cancer, being fertile or not.
Actually, pregnancy and birth are one way to find out just how far apart your mind and body can be. You can do as much yoga as is possible when you can't see your feet, sip raspberry tea until it comes out of your raspberry ripples, visualise and self-hypnotise and acupuncturise... and you still end up with a 24-hour labour, emergency C section and a baby that's born completely blue. At least, that's what happened to me. But then I was one of the lucky ones.
• Kathryn Flett returns next week
