Fertility treatments could aid Europe demographic crisis

Providing fertility treatment to more women could help offset Europe’s demographic crisis, a leading think tank said on Monday.

Increasing longevity, improvements in health care and falling birth rates mean that by 2050 the number of Europeans over the age of 65 will double from around 15 percent to about 30 percent.

Governments are concerned about the financial consequences because the graying population will increase healthcare and pension costs and there will be fewer younger people in the work force.

RAND Europe, an independent research organization that has been studying how governments can address the issue, believes providing more fertility treatment, or assisted reproductive technology (ART), could increase dwindling birth rates and help to offset the crisis.

“ART could be considered part of a population policy mix,” Dr Jonathan Grant, the director of RAND Europe, told a news conference at a fertility meeting.

“The message to governments is that you need lots of different policies if you want to increase fertility rates and ART could be one of those policies,” he added.

On average, women in European countries now have less than two children. It ranges from a high of 1.9 in Ireland and France to low of 1.3 in Spain and Italy.

Demographers suggest 2.1 children per woman are needed to sustain existing population levels.

Some countries provide more free fertility treatments to patients than others. In Israel, where there is no limit on the number of free fertility treatments, eight percent of babies are conceived through in-vitro fertilization (IVF).

Sweden and Denmark have also adopted family-friendly policies such as generous maternity and paternity leave and child care and assurances that women can return to their jobs after the birth.

Grant, who studied the impact of increasing government funding for ART in Britain to levels similar to Denmark where is more available found that it could increase fertility rates.

“What we are seeing is that ART could make a small but not insignificant contribution to the overall total fertility rate,” added Grant, whose research was funded by the Swiss-based biopharmaceutical company Ferring.

The Infertility Network UK, a patient association for couples, said it supports increasing the availability of treatments.

“We agree wholeheartedly with the suggestion that assisted reproduction techniques should be used to help mitigate the consequences of falling birth rates,” Clare Brown, the chief executive of Infertility Network UK, said in a statement released at the meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE).

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