INFERTILITY is more traumatic for many patients than cancer but is still unrecognised by the Government as a serious medical condition, according to Britain’s best known expert in the specialty.

Lord Winston has accused ministers of ignoring the “corrosive” suffering of childless men and women, by “making a show” of supporting treatment without providing the funds to make it properly available.

The emotional pain of infertile patients is often greater than that experienced by people with cancer, he said, yet there is still a widespread assumption that they are not deserving of therapy on the NHS.

The inability to have a child interferes with a genetically programmed need that is as deeply ingrained as sex drive, and must be acknowledged as a priority for modern medicine, Lord Winston said. People who know that they may never become parents must accept that their genes will never be passed on, forcing them to confront their own mortality. The fertility specialist and Labour peer, who recently retired from his NHS post at Hammersmith Hospital in London, said that he had been more profoundly moved by the plight of infertile patients than by any other aspect of his long medical career.

In a speech to the Progress Educational Trust, a reproductive medicine and genetics charity, he said: “The fertility clinic is more distressing than anything else in medicine. Even if you compare it to the cancer ward, there is no contest.

“We don’t recognise the extreme and corrosive distress that infertility causes. For most people it is a bitter, cruel and prolonged blow that is difficult to come to terms with. I find it extraordinary that we have failed to understand this.”

He told The Times: “In my early days, I was doing a lot of the work that all young doctors do, which included cancer patients. It always struck me that although cancer patients were often highly distressed, they live with the hope that they might get better.

“Infertility patients don’t always have that hope. They realise that most of the time the treatment doesn’t work, or that they won’t be able to afford it. A lot of people when you really question them — both women and men — are hugely destabilised about being infertile. There is a deep-seated grief. They may not show it publicly, but it is greatly damaging.”

The Government, he said, was paying lip service to IVF patients by promising one free cycle of treatment to most couples, but had failed to provide money to allow trusts to provide this. “Britain makes a show of funding it, but when it does it does so uncertainly and unfairly,” he said. “I think the Government has practised self-deception. It’s tried to pretend that it’s going to make cycles of treatment freely available, but it has not implemented the suggestion properly. It’s provided no new money.”

He compared Britain unfavourably with countries such as Israel, France and Belgium, where multiple cycles of IVF are available free of charge.

Lord Winston, whose latest television series, The Story of God, is being screened on BBC One, said the Old Testament illustrated that human beings had an innate drive to procreate that could be psychologically damaging if denied. “Of the Bible’s four matriarchs — Sarah, Abraham’s wife; Rebecca, Isaac’s wife; and Jacob’s wives, Leah and Rachel — three were infertile,” he said. “Their suffering is described in great detail, and expresses the genetic imperative that humans have to have children. It’s like the sexual drive, and is equally linked to something innate in the human.”

He said he accepted that nobody had a right to children, but that this was no argument against treating patients on the NHS who would otherwise endure great mental trauma.

“Of course it is nobody’s right to have a child,” he said. “You can’t have a right that can’t be enforced. Everyone though has a right to be treated with appropriateness, and to have their condition recognised as a genuine complaint that causes great distress.”

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