With the closure or limited opening of fertility clinics due to the pandemic, fertility patients have had much fewer opportunities to connect with professionals through open days or fertility fairs, which prompted the magazine IVF babble to organise a live online Fertility Expo. I attended the event on 19 July and was able to explore a virtual showroom with over 50 booths belonging to fertility clinics, charities and other specialists. Many of the booths were staffed via a live chat function and offered the option to book online consultations. In the ‘auditorium’ I attended live talks about evidence and add-on treatments, the connections between stress and fertility, and the role of a fertility coach, as well as a panel session on self-care while trying to conceive, and I watched two short films explaining how Embryoscope works. The range of topics explored was impressive.
I was particularly struck by the international spread of speakers and clinics represented at the expo. While it comes as no surprise that fertility treatment crosses borders, travel within and between countries has become synonymous with risk and danger during the pandemic. Restricted travel has had huge impacts on planned or initiated fertility treatment abroad and media reports have described desperate situations where people have been unable to retrieve babies from surrogates (see here). Inevitably these new risks and limits to mobility will place additional stress on a process that can already feel risky at every stage.
The idea of avoiding unnecessary risk has become a familiar frame of mind over the last couple of months, although for patients in the midst of fertility treatment, calculations of necessity and risk are highly complex, emotional and shifting. Back to the expo, many of the talks I attended seemed to assume that the world of fertility treatment will be returning to ‘normal’ at some point in the not-too-far future, yet I questioned to what extent this will be the case. I wondered what long-lasting impacts the pandemic will have on the landscape of fertility treatment, patients’ decision-making processes and their maintenance of hope, as these respond to a contemporary moment of uncertainty.