The UK policy toward providing fertility services tends to draw on ideas about ‘procreative liberty’. Often such policies combine pronatalism ideology (reproduction as an intrinsic good) with a commitment to individual autonomy. The concept of reproductive liberty, however, fails to acknowledge the necessity of government assistance in facilitating reproductive choice, and a gap is emerging between the language of ‘rights’ to particular services and access to those services.
Research to date exploring access to fertility services has focussed on the impact of involuntarily childlessness, but there has been scant attention to the related, but important, question of why people choose to have children in the first place. The lack of empirical literature exploring the reasons why people do reproduce is evidence in itself of the generally unquestioned acceptance of pronatalism, suggesting the decision to have children needs less scrutiny than the decision not to. The questions we propose to include in ALSPAC will explore the reasons people have for making reproductive decisions, with a view to facilitating a better understanding of the reasons behind reproductive decisions. This, in turn, will help us to build a more complete understanding of the relative importance of being able to access fertility services and the value people place on specific means of reproduction and parenting, which can feed into analysis of arguments about the funding of fertility services.