Sexual Health News: World Health Organization Declares ‘Being Single Now a Disability’
2016-10-25
By
Health authorities will soon consider single men and women who want to have their own children but failed to find a partner sexually disabled. The World Health Organization (WHO) now defines infertility aside from a poor sexual health as inability to find a suitable sexual partner.
The WHO now looks at sexual health in a different way. The new definition of infertility simply indicates being single is a disability.
The health authority will classify single men and women without medical issues but with an inactive sex life as “infertile.” It only applies to those who do not have children but “want to become a parent,” the WHO said.
The authors of the new global standards said it will mainly give the individuals “the right to reproduce.” It will allow single men, women and the members of the LGBT community to receive the same treatment given to the couples seeking IVF due to medical fertility problems.
The WHO also said the new standards will put pressure on the NHS to change the policy on who can access the IVF treatment. The health authority plans to send the new definition of infertility to all health ministers in 2017, reports The Telegraph.
“It’s a big change,” said Dr. David Adamson, one of the authors of the new standards. “The definition of infertility is now written in such a way that it includes the rights of all individuals to have a family, and that includes single men, single women, gay men, gay women.”
SEXUAL HEALTH & THE NEW STANDARDS
Critics call the decision an “absurd nonsense.” They said the couples with medical infertility would lose the chance for a child. It’s because the new standards will increase the number of those who seek IVF.
The current NHS policies only allow clinics to give the treatment to those proven infertile.
“This definition runs the risk of undermining the work Nice and others have done to ensure IVF treatment is made available for infertile couples when you get definitions off the mark like this,” said Gareth Johnson MP, the former chair of the All Parliamentary Group on Infertility. “I think it’s trying to put IVF into a box that it doesn’t fit into frankly.”
Josephine Quintavalle, from the Comment on Reproductive Ethics, added, “This absurd nonsense is not simply re-defining infertility.” She said it’s “completely side-lining the biological process and significance of natural intercourse between a man and a woman.”