what's the british fertility society, anyhow?

[keryx]

So, the British Fertility Society posted a statement about how they don't hate fat people, really in response to the media furor about their recommendations.

It sounded initially like they were trying to argue that, well, since public funding for fertility treatment is limited, the NHS should pick a group of risk factors for pregnancy and not allow those folk treatment. Of course, fat people get denied fertility treatment a lot - so even when a relatively uninfluential group declares us too fat for pregnancy (my BMI is over their limit, by the way... that's a load off), we get pretty pissed off at the blase discrimination. But in the same paper - which seems to be aimed at trying to direct British healthcare towards more "equal" access to state-funded fertility treatment, something I suspect helps to pay a lot of their salaries - the BFS peeps also assert that same-sex couples and single women should get the same access to treatment as anyone else. They also think smokers should be able to get free fertility treatment. So I guess they mean equal funding and treatment unless you're fat. Which is just stupid.

As far as I can tell, they're not any kind of decision-making authority, and their paper seems much like the US bariatric association issueing papers about how bad obesity is - they're both essentially physicians' lobby groups.

What's ultimately offensive (and the thing that made me say to a couple of people how much I wish sometimes obesity were declared a disease and fat folk granted protections of the ADA and stuff) is that they could choose a whole lot of social factors (previous children, income, etc.) and yet also pick being fat as the only medical risk factor. It sounds like yet more short-sighted doctors wanting to think of fat as a personal failing or lifestyle issue.

Comments

[miffyness.livejournal.com]

One of the most distasteful aspects of this was seeing the right-wing press suddenly pretend to care about obese women, solely in order to argue that they were more entitled to fertility treatment than single women and lesbians, who of course should not really be allowed to breed at all. (The idea that these categories might overlap didn't seem to occur to anyone -- for the purposes of rhetoric all fat women were happily married and would probably spend their lives baking.)