England’s first not-for-profit fertility clinic has shut within a year of opening and has been sold to a private provider, in what one of its founders called “a tragedy for women”.
The game-changing clinic – operated by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), better known for providing abortions – promised to take the profit out of fertility treatment when it opened in December 2021.
The idea was to provide IVF at cost price, with a transparent pricing structure and a promise to only perform evidence-based procedures rather than the unproved “add-ons” promoted by some private clinics. The ultimate plan was to use BPAS clinics across the UK to offer satellite services, such as consultations and scans, while egg collection and embryo transfers would be done at the London-based fertility clinic.
Yet eight months into operation, BPAS’s board decided to shut down the service without telling the public why. It stopped taking on patients in August last year, and this February the clinic was quietly sold to a private, for-profit provider.
Bridge Clinic London now operates the service, maintaining a commitment to fair and transparent pricing. The new clinic started seeing patients last month, the Guardian understands.
The closure was greeted with sadness by the former BPAS chief executive Ann Furedi, who left in December 2020. Having gone through IVF, Furedi said she felt strongly that infertility and abortion were two sides of the same coin, in that both affect women’s control over their reproductive functions.
“Women who have abortions are not different women to women who need infertility treatment. That’s not because abortion screws up your fertility, but because you’re at different times of your life,” she said.
Furedi had advocated strongly for BPAS to open the clinic and said she was sorry it had not been given a chance to reach the break-even point. “It’s a tragedy for women and it’s a massive disappointment to all of us who have been involved in trying to make it work,” she said.
She said the clinic was “the right idea at the wrong time” and that external forces – such as Covid and inflation – conspired against it. She said the clinic had not been expected to break even for at least the first three years, and that BPAS invested its reserves to get it going.
Until the Guardian began investigating the clinic’s sale this week, BPAS had not explained why it took the decision. Furedi said she did not know why, but argued that the charity, which advocates for women as well as providing medical services, had a duty to be transparent about what happened.
Furedi said: “This very, very novel project was as much about saying: ‘It is possible to provide this kind of service.’ It was planned as a beacon of what can be done. Therefore, it’s important for people to be able to learn the lesson of failing, as much as we would have wanted them to learn the lessons from it succeeding.”
Clare Murphy, who took over from Furedi at BPAS, said: “No one has a monopoly on sadness about the fact that it is not BPAS providing this care. But those involved did what was needed to successfully protect the future of both services [abortion and infertility] after an incredibly challenging period.”
BPAS lost almost £3.5m in the year ending 31 March 2022. Murphy said the charity had been forced “to make incredibly difficult decisions in order to bring the most benefit to the women we serve”.
She said: “BPAS had no recourse to additional NHS funds during the pandemic, and the telemedical transformation needed to keep supporting women needing abortions during Covid was funded by ourselves.
“This was against a backdrop of increasing need by women, which has only continued to grow. We had contracts which fell far short of costs to deliver. All of these have also been reviewed. These financial challenges were significant factors in the decision around fertility.”
She insisted BPAS’s forthcoming strategy would “double down on our commitment to campaigning and advocacy to support women’s reproductive choices, including fair access to fertility treatments”.
• This article was amended on 22 May 2023 to correct some personal details.
