A genuine desire that other couples don't experience this
Really, it was our fault for not checking the website more carefully. My partner and I received a recommendation from a friend-of-a-friend and booked a phone consultation with Ira Winter (Fiat Fertility Care).
It seems unkind to leave a bad review for someone who feels they're helping, but it was a profoundly unhelpful and jarring experience for us, when making careful and painful decisions about how to start a family, to be told about the importance of Christian marriage in order to receive fertility support.
Ira explained that many good Doctors have left the NHS because they couldn't square their convictions about marriage with the medical support they were required to give to unmarried couples. She felt this ultimately damages patients, because they have fewer doctors available. I think what she meant was, *she* left the NHS because she wanted to prioritise her personal faith over the needs of patients who don't share it and the fundamental requirement for health care to be unbiased. This was entangled with objections to IVF, which might be reasonable, but which become entirely untrustworthy when heard in the context of Ira's final message to us during a fertility consultation - 'a child is a gift from God'.
The immensely unethical thing about all this was that Ira acknowledged, from a medical perspective, the difficulty of my partner's situation and implied that fertility support was needed. But this was then implicitly withheld because we weren't married. And if a couple are being encouraged to avoid IVF in favour of a ’natural’ approach, this needs to be supported with strong evidence and reasoning, not an objection that IVF is interfering with - as her website states - ‘God’s plan for conception’. In a health setting, this thinking becomes genuinely problematic and upsetting for patients.
We first became alarmed when she asked about how good our relationship was and if we were married. After explaining it was a strong, 9 year relationship but we weren't interested in marriage at the moment, we were told that marriage leads to couples staying together and this leads to a better environment for children. Ira also lamented 'modern' changes in the number of married couples. Having spent 16 years working in Children and Family Services, this is an extraordinarily unprofessional thing to bring to a clinical consultation which should be exploring the needs of a patient, not the personal judgements of the practitioner. A loving, nurturing environment for children does not require Christian/married parents and faith/marriage does not guarantee this environment. There is certainly a crucial commitment for parents to make when hoping to conceive. But the fact that Ira feels it's her role to prescribe the specific environment into which children should be born shows how truly bizarre Fiat Fertility is.
Here comes the gut-punch... Ira stated that doctors are unlikely to support couples in our situation who aren't married. We have been through very painful experiences on our journey towards conceiving and we enter into a certain emotional state during phone and in-person consultations, which might explain why it took some time to understand how outrageous and demonstrably untrue this was. We were in shock. Ira mentioned not just marriage, but specifically Christian marriage. She explained that she will see unmarried couples too, as if this is a generous concession rather than an ethical requirement of health practitioners. But she also clearly stated that the prescription of Progesterone and other support is available only to married couples. We’re still struggling to understand what she means and why she thinks this is the case. Perhaps she wishes it so.
Ira presents as a lone religious activist, probably genuinely caring towards couples, but only if they share her personal views and can comfortably accept this muddling of faith, ethics and health. It was clear what her priorities were and the conversation was dominated by her views on marriage. Understanding the feelings and medical scenario of my partner took a back seat.
*To be actively discouraged or diverted from a possible solution towards having a child because of someone's personal religious judgements felt horrible.* We’ve discussed contacting Ira to explain how the conversation made us feel, not to mention the plainly incorrect thoughts around the support available, but it just feels too exhausting and upsetting to go through it again.
I wish couples who share Ira's beliefs all the very best, but wanted to write this review in the hope that other couples who don't be spared a set-back on an already upsetting journey.