What fertility patients actually report
Most used an add-on. Most paid extra. Two thirds had some regret.
Four independent studies: two surveys of patients, and two audits of what clinics say on their own websites.
1,590 Australian women who had IVF since 2017:
| Finding | Share |
|---|---|
| Used one or more add-on | 82% |
| Paid an additional cost for it | 72% |
| Assumed add-ons were known to be safe | 49% |
| Experienced some decision regret | 66% |
| Decision regret among those whose IVF was unsuccessful | 83% |
| Decision regret where the specialist had contributed more to the decision | 75% |
Regret tracked two things: whether the treatment worked, and whether the patient felt the decision had been made by the clinician rather than with her. Half of them believed safety had been established. It had not.
The authors are careful about their own limits. This was a retrospective survey recruited through social media and reliant on what women remembered, and they note that response bias is most likely to affect exactly these regret and decision-making figures.
1,500 UK fertility patients, surveyed by the regulator in 2024:
Also from that survey: only 62% of private patients received a personalised cost breakdown, and 40% of those who did paid more than they had originally been shown.
What clinics actually say. An audit of 74 UK fertility centre websites across 1,401 pages found 276 claims of benefit relating to 41 different interventions. Only 29% of those claims were quantified. Sixteen published references were cited in total, across just 13 of the 74 websites. Sixty-one of those websites cited nothing at all.
An equivalent audit of 40 Australian and New Zealand clinic websites found 78% advertised at least one add-on, 77% of the descriptions claimed a benefit, 90% of those claims were unquantified, and 9.8% referenced any scientific publication. Costs ranged from nothing to $3,700 per add-on in Australian and New Zealand dollars. The authors concluded that none of the add-ons were supported by high-quality evidence of benefit for pregnancy or live birth rates.
The fertility field publishes its own ethics opinion on informed consent in assisted reproduction. These figures describe what is happening alongside it.