People who don’t have sex or struggle to find a sexual partner to have children with will now be considered as disabled, according to new guidelines set to be announced.
Until now, infertility – the failure to achieve pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sex – was not considered a disability.
But now in dramatic move the World Health Organisation will change the standard to suggest that a person who is unable to find a suitable sexual partner or is lacking a sexual relationship to have children – will now be equally classified as disabled.
WHO says the change will give every individual “the right to reproduce”.
Under the new rules, heterosexual single men and women and gay men and women who want to have children will now be given the same priority as a couple seeking IVF because of medical fertility problems.
But critics branded the new laws as “absurd nonsense” arguing that the organisation has overstepped the mark by moving into social matters rather than health.
Gareth Johnson MP, former chair of the UK’s All Parliamentary Group on Infertility, whose own children were born thanks to fertility treatment, told Daily Express newspaper: “I’m in general a supporter of IVF. But I’ve never regarded infertility as a disability or a disease but rather a medical matter.
“I’m the first to say you should have more availability of IVF to infertile couples but we need to ensure this whole subject retains credibility.
“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. I think it’s trying to put IVF into a box that it doesn’t fit into frankly.”