Why Reform Wants to Reduce Financial Support For IVF While Increasing Taxes for the Childless
Spoiler: it's all about curtailing women
The intersection between politics and not having children is prominent and only getting more so. This is a little bonus piece for this month. When I read about this, I had to write about it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Why would a political party so obsessed with women having children make it harder for them to do so?
Honestly, you couldn’t make it up. Reform, the UK’s equivalent to Trump’s Republican gang, is obsessed with falling fertility rates, thinks women need to be educated about their biological clocks and wants to introduce a tax penalty on people without children. And yet, they are reducing access to fertility treatment, which will have an adverse effect on their perversions.
Sounds contradictory, right? It is, until we realise their long game. Buckle in, this may be an uncomfortable read.
Who is Bridget Porter, and what did she say about IVF?
So how did we get here? Well, a few days ago, at the Kent County Council (KCC) health overview and scrutiny committee, Reform councillor, Bridget Porter, made deeply problematic and controversial comments about IVF.
In her support of the Kent and Medway NHS’s reduction of access to IVF from two sessions on the NHS, down to just one, she referred to the one session as “very generous”. She went on to say, “Treatments aren’t health necessities, they’re lifestyle choices”, and compared fertility treatment to cosmetic surgery for aesthetic reasons, such as butt lifts and nose jobs.
She also said that those who “can’t afford children shouldn’t be bringing them into the world.”
For fuck sake! Make up your mind, Reform. When we choose not to have kids, for any number of reasons — including financial — we are attacked and criticised and threatened with a childless tax (Yes, Reform don’t distinguish between childfree and childless). And now this wagon is suggesting that having children is a luxury only available for the elite.
Isn’t it the role of the government to make the conditions of a country conducive to having kids? Isn’t it the role of a government to support its citizens’ basic needs, such as food and shelter?
How dare she shift the blame and shame onto the individual struggling financially, as opposed to the greedy bastards at the top, squeezing us dry, making daily life unaffordable? And remember, many of us are only one disaster away from poverty.
So in one breath, Reform is harking on about a “population crisis” and shaming those of us choosing not to have kids, and in the other, they are saying that anyone who can’t afford kids shouldn’t have them. Make up your minds, you single-brain-celled amoebas.
And what of that lifestyle comment?
It’s actually funny to hear the party, so obsessed with “family,” refer to having kids as a “lifestyle choice”. It makes it sound as if they are open to the alternative: not having kids. In reality, there’s nothing the right fears more than a woman without kids.
This gatekeeping of motherhood is nothing new. But when it’s women gatekeeping women, somehow it feels stickier. There’s a gross hierarchical superiority game at play.
Bridget Porter has two adult children. Given her lack of empathy displayed by her crass comments in defence of restricting access to fertility treatments in her district, I am going to hedge my bets and suggest she didn’t need any fertility treatment; otherwise, I think she would have more empathy. More understanding.
If she struggled to conceive and was denied adequate access to fertility treatment, how would she feel if her attempts to access such treatments were brushed off as a “lifestyle choice”? How would she feel if seeking fertility treatment was compared to getting a Brazilian butt lift?
I know of some mothers who hang their identity on being a mother and yet are vocally against NHS-funded IVF (I bet they claim their child benefits every month). Such vociferous gatekeeping. I struggle to comprehend how they can both claim reverence for being a mother while pulling up the drawbridge behind them, denying potentially life-altering treatment to those who are finding access to the ranks of motherhood tricky and unattainable without intervention.
Political parties like Reform hold the sanctity of motherhood up as the only way for women to achieve gold status as beings. Mark my words, though, I am not saying they support mothers. But they use motherhood as the only valid criterion to judge a woman’s worth.
This little game they are playing with IVF isn’t so much about financial support. It’s about curtailing women.
The real truth behind the IVF restrictions
Reform hates women without children. Because women without children are less encumbered and can focus their attention on other things. We take up space in what were once male-dominated areas.
According to this article in The Guardian, the well-known misogynist Jordan Peterson and failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin (the one who proposed the extra tax on people without kids) recorded a podcast episode lambasting successful women without children. They said that universities have become hotbeds of “politically correct authoritarianism” because they are full of “childless women”.
Uh oh, these pesky women without children. What are we to do with them?
There’s been a slight shift in the demographics seeking IVF. It’s usually women between the ages of 35 and 44 who are highly educated, might have delayed marriage and have established careers.
Reform has a massive problem with women. Women in the workplace. Women having rights. Women having body autonomy. Women having opinions. Women having equality.
So this little IVF tactic is exactly that — a tactic. It isn’t about the cost of fertility treatment. They are even willing to risk the short-term negative impact their tactic may have on birth rates. This ploy is about controlling women and forcing them back into the home — and thus out of the workplace.
Not only has Bridget Porter’s district, Kent and Medway NHS, reduced fertility treatment from two rounds down to one, but it has also dropped the upper age limit for treatment from 40 to 38.
And this is just the start. You’ll see. Access to IVF will become more and more restricted, as a means for Reform to coerce women into having kids earlier in life, in the hope that it keeps us from seeking higher education and removes us from executive positions in the workplace. They are trying to keep women out of important conversations.
Reform wants women to be too exhausted and distracted by motherhood to be able to contend with their sexist and fascist policies.
Ultimately, it’s about control. Controlling and curtailing women. Shackling women with motherhood, like the good old days.
So here we are. The political war against women without kids continues. This time, the line of attack is on those who are desperate to join the ranks of motherhood but are struggling to conceive. Honestly, this is the lowest of lows.
You know how Reform will play this? They will hold childless women up and blame them for trying to get pregnant “too late”. Reform will use the grief of those unable to have kids as fuel to their already lit fire about how women should be having kids earlier in life. And how we need to be aware of our biological clocks.
I’m 45, and I’m childfree by choice. This does not impact me. But my gosh, my heart is aching for all those whose dreams will be shattered, and lives irrevocably crushed by this cruel and callous change to fertility treatment access. And those barbaric and monstrous comments by Bridget Porter prove that Reform has no soul and is definitely not the party of the family.
I’d love to hear from you. Will this change to IVF impact you? Would it have impacted you in the past? Why do you think they’ve made these changes?
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Mine wasn’t a lifestyle choice rather to do with having cancer, it’s unfair to suggest that. It isn’t funded in many areas and costs a fortune to afford. If you are 40 then it’s also not funded and it’s women that suffer with trying to have a child, then not having one. Why shouldn’t women be allowed to make a choice about their fertility a majority of men do and women are attacked for making Thais own body choices. The ramifications of IVF can be horrendous with the trauma of it not working and paying for treatments. It’s hard enough not having children then having to pay extra when you are told you are lucky not to have them particularly if you are by circumstances childless.
Well this is a just a new level of awful. I hadn't heard of this before, so that you for bringing it to light.
It also reminded me of a podcast I listened to a few years back that was interviewing right-wing folks on the topic of abortion. One women, in particular, stuck out to me. She was vehemently against abortion, believed it wrong 100% of the time. The kicker? She'd had one herself. But somehow she couldn't connect her own experience to her staunch opinion. It was this grotesque gatekeeping of another aspect of women's choice by a woman who had benefited from having one.
Whether it is abortion or IVF, it does feel stickier when it's a woman on the other end making it harder for other women. We so need to unwind ourselves from the internalized misogyny. I just wish I knew how we can all do that!