Pedofile checks for IVF users – unfair

I saw George Michael in the flesh once.  I was having dinner in a North London pub and he came and sat in a neighbouring booth with some friends of his.

My cousin who I was with just about wet her pants. She was a fan in the 80s and told me she used to gaze adoringly at her Wham poster every night.

George is well known and loved for his music.  Along with Elton John, he is one of the UK’s most well known gay icons.

Western society for the most part understands and supports gay people although there are still those with strange and deranged ideas. One of the craziest is that gay people are more at risk of being pedophiles. God knows how this association was ever made but the link is offensive, outrageous and unfounded.

Similarly unfair is the need for people seeking IVF to have to undergo police record checks in Victoria, Australia.

Do parents who can conceive naturally have to get a police record check first?  Why not?  Why should those who use assisted reproduction have to be checked?

As this is a hoop Ross and I have to jump through, this week we begin the process of getting our police records for both Australia and the UK, where we lived before we moved here.

I wonder what on earth the people who passed the legislation compelling the checks last year were thinking?

http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/parents-angered-by-ivf-police-checks-20090903-f8m6.html

The elephant in the room

I love the term ‘the elephant in the room’.  It is used  a lot by politicians – I first heard it when I moved to Australia two years ago.

There’s a big elephant in the room whenever I talk to my sisters about my husband Ross and my efforts to have a baby.

I have premature ovarian failure which means my stash of eggs has run out early. If I am ever to carry and give birth to our own baby, we’ll have to use another woman’s egg .

My three sisters haven’t offered themselves up as egg donors even though I keep them updated with our progress down this road which includes visits to IVF doctors, counselling sessions and applying for police checks to prove we aren’t pedophiles (I kid you not but that’s a topic for a future blog).

I oscillate between accepting my sisters’ silence and understanding I have no right to expect this of them, while on other days I feel desperately upset they haven’t offered.

On the other hand I have three gorgeous friends who have proffered their ovums.  Their generosity stuns me.

But back to the elephant; my sisters’ silence remains. What should I do?  Ask them straight out and embarrass them into saying yay or nay? Ask my Mum to broker the topic with them?  Ignore it and risk my anger and upset growing to explosive magnitude?  It all sounds pretty hideous but a way will become clear soon.

Then hopefully that big, red elephant will leave the room and go back from whence it came.