According to the World Health Organisation, one in six people, or 17.5 per cent of adults worldwide, will experience the challenges of infertility, or are already experiencing it. The Middle East is not excluded from this reality, with couples undergoing treatment for infertility in the hope of starting or expanding their families.
In what might make many of them optimistic, a new, personalised treatment in Abu Dhabi has enabled a 42-year-old Emirati woman to give birth to a healthy baby boy, five years after the couple began their in-vitro fertilisation, or IVF, treatment.
If this type of customised treatment becomes more popular, it could be one way to help address the declining birth rates seen around the world, including in the region. But fertility treatments – whether IVF or Intrauterine Insemination, or IUI –come with challenges, emotional, physical and financial. On the financial, treatments often mean a hefty price tag because of which, unfortunately, not all who desire to become parents are able to, leading to larger societal implications. The fertility rate in the UAE declined 0.59 per cent this year from 2024, according to the research platform Macrotrends.
Most IVF specialists concur on fertility treatments being an ordeal for prospective parents, with no guaranteed success. In The National's previous reports on the issue, Cassie Destino, the founder of a patient support organisation called IVF Support UAE, said: “I have watched people go at it over and over and over, and spend hundreds of thousands of dirhams and not end up with child. That’s the hardest part.”
With rising problems of infertility, the market for fertility services in the UAE is sizeable. In 2023, it generated a revenue of $443.1 million. That figure in five years’ time is expected to reach $710 million, growing at a rate of 7 per cent from 2024 to 2030, according to the consulting firm Grand View Research.
Clearly, as much as there is a demand for these treatments, there is a need for them to also become more affordable so that couples across income brackets can access specialised medical expertise.
The need for insurance companies to include fertility treatments in many more compensation packages cannot be stressed enough as it could significantly lessen the financial strain on a household.
Given that fertility challenges are often attributed to a variety of individual circumstances – including career prioritisation, getting married at an older age, medical challenges, and also in many cases, simply the way in which lives pan out – more women might be inclined to opt for procedures such as freezing their eggs, if only the financial costs were not prohibitive – and consequentially, an option ruled out, leading to other complications in time.
A consultant in obstetrics, gynaecology and reproductive health, Dr Human Fatemi, who treated the 42-year-old patient, told The National: “We have reached the era of individualised medicine, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach any more. Every month, the endocrine profile of a woman differs, so the way you approach stimulating a woman for IVF is different.”
If new fertility treatments see the kind of success this one family has experienced, thousands of other couples in the country could similarly benefit, especially if the need for more fertility clinics was addressed.
More clinics opening, equipped with the medical technology and personalised treatment plans, could – even if it does not guarantee a baby – ensure the most likely chances of healthy births.
As a result, given the laws of demand and supply, the costs of IVF treatments that can take years and drain a couple’s finances, would decrease and lessen the burden that treatments can carry, especially on an emotional level. Some of these measures are essential to ensuring a family can grow as it desires. From a wider socio-economic point of view, they are crucial measures that, in the long term, can help a society sustain a healthy and growing population.
