Use the IAAC website to lobby for funding if you're in Ontario - I just did

Their website will direct your story to the appropriate government people, including your MPP: http://www.iaac.ca/my-story/

Here's what I wrote:
My apologies for a long letter, but I wanted to let you know the extent of our struggle with infertility, as well as how unfair or inequitable I find the current OHIP funded system to be.
I sincerely hope that the Ontario government will strongly consider improving funding for infertility treatment, and will take a close look at the recommendations from the Expert Panel on Infertility and Adoption that will be coming out next month.
I'm a 34.5 year old final year Anesthesia resident, and have been battling infertility since Oct 2006. My husband and I have been together for nearly 12 years, but it wasn't until the summer of 2005 that we got married and he emigrated to Canada to allow me to finish becoming a Canadian physician.
Since I was already 31 and had been previously told by one of my Ob/Gyn preceptors in med school that I had PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome), we threw out the birth control and started trying to conceive right away. I knew we would likely have trouble, so I started charting after 2 months, and although I was having irregular cycles, I was sure we were timing things appropriately. After a year with no success, I sought help from my family doctor, who started me on metformin and sent my husband for a semen analysis, which seemed on the face of it to be borderline ok.
Since I'm actually very thin (BMI just under 19), there wasn't anything that I could really do to "cure" my PCOS on its own, and after 13 months of trying, I was frustrated enough to seek a referral to a reproductive endocrinologist who I happened to work with during one of my rotations at St. Michael's hospital. She managed to squeeze me in on one of her lunch breaks, and confirmed that I was unlikely to get pregnant without help.
Thus started a year of various low-intervention treatments, from progesterone supplementation to help fix my luteal phase defect, to clomid + progesterone, to clomid + HCG shots after a cycle with near-daily bloodwork and ultrasounds showed that I had low estrogen and progesterone in the luteal phase.
At that point, although it was hard to sort out the investigations with my busy work schedule as a resident, I was still fairly laid back about things, and assumed it would just be a matter of time. We moved on to using femara instead of clomid, which was obviously not working for me, and, miracle of miracles, found out at the end of Dec 2007 that I was finally pregnant. Everything looked good on the first two sets of bloodwork done to confirm the pregnancy, but then my beta-HCG stopped rising appropriately, and we entered a 4 week rollercoaster ride from hell, with bad betas and good ultrasounds until I started spotting while on call one weekend up at Sunnybrook. I scanned myself with one of the ultrasounds we used for central line placements for our anesthetics and could still see a heartbeat, but when I went back in to work the next morning, I couldn't find it any more. I had to tell the staff I was working with that day what was going on, and then left work to get a confirmatory ultrasound via my family doctor. Sure enough, the baby's heart had stopped at 8.5weeks. We were devastated.
After recovering from the miscarriage, we spent another few months hoping that the same medication would work again, but in the meantime sought a urology consult for my husband. They found that he had very borderline sperm, with poor volume, morphology and motility. We decided to change doctors and try adding in injectibles and IUIs to boost our chances of becoming pregnant.
I then did about 5 cycles with injectibles and femara, two of which we managed to do IUIs for. It was a real struggle to arrange "convenient" times for the monitoring that I needed to do with the injectables, given my work schedule, and was a huge source of stress for me.
We had a chemical pregnancy with the first IUI, but lost that at 4.5 weeks, when again I started to bleed while on call at the Toronto General Hospital. You should have seen the uproar when I was sent home from call to lie down and wait and see how the pregnancy would turn out. I can't do my job from home, and if I'm not able to go to work, they have to find someone else to cover for me. Emails were flying like mad about others having to cover my call, and I was made to feel guilty for letting my reproductive woes affect the rest of the department. There were a heck of a lot more people who found out about my short-lived pregnancy and miscarriage that I ever would have wanted to tell about it.
We then found out that my husband's sperm has fairly severe DNA fragmentation, and that our best hope of finally having a child of our own would be to undergo IVF with ICSI. I have since managed to start a cycle of IVF in between the two parts of my Anesthesia licensing exams this spring, only to be cancelled just before I was supposed to go in for egg retrieval because my hormones weren't showing the appropriate response to the medications I was on.
Once again, we were devastated. We'd been planning this cycle for months, making arrangements for me to have a later start to my days during the crucial monitoring week so that I could have that done and not inconvenience people at work. My work day is from 6:45am to 4:30-5:30pm, so I can't do any of this infertility treatment without telling a few people what's going on, and explaining why I'll have to be late many days a month. My husband has had to move business trips around so that he can be in town to make "his contribution" to whatever cycle we're doing.
Now I'm worried that it will be a long time before I can manage to schedule another cycle, because I'm starting work in a community hospital in July when I finish my training. I won't be able to show up there and tell them that I'm doing IVF, so my OR list will just have to start late for a couple weeks while I do the monitoring. I have no idea how I'm going to manage to work out doing another cycle once I'm on staff in the community. If I'm not there to work, some patient doesn't get their operation.
Not only is the time commitment of pursuing infertility treatment agonizing, nor is it fun to have transvaginal ultrasounds done to monitor follicular growth multiple times a month, or to get scars from all the bloodwork, but the financial strain has a huge impact on those of us suffering from infertility. The medications are very expensive, and are rarely covered by insurance plans, and the infertility treatments themselves are expensive too.
It's hard for me to believe that OHIP still covers IVF for people with bilaterally blocked tubes, but delisted IVF for severe male factor infertility, claiming that the evidence to support IVF's efficacy in that situation was not present. Times have changed, and male factor infertility is a well-known indication for IVF treatment.
I also, particularly in my profession, find it very hard to swallow the arguments that others put forth about how infertility isn't an illness, and that one doesn't have a right to have a child. And that for those reasons, our taxes shouldn't pay for IVF treatment.
Neither my husband nor I smoke, nor do we eat unhealthy food, nor do we drink excessively. Yet my taxes will pay for lung resections for smokers who've given themselves cancer and continue to smoke, along with their ICU care postop. They pay for the obese patient who've given themselves type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease to have their triple bypass done, along with their ICU care.
I've had to admit an end-stage Alzheimer's patient to the ICU and ventilate her for her aspiration pneumonia for a week (this was the third aspiration pneumonia requiring ICU admission in the space of 2 months). I've looked after one ICU patient who had been ventilated for over 2.5 years for their end-stage COPD. That patient is still ventilated in the same ICU 1.5 years later. I've cared for another who had an as-yet-undiagnosed neurodegenerative disease with zero hope of recovery, who can only open their eyes, but can't respond meaningfully to the outside world - that patient has been on the ventilator in an ICU for well over 6 years. How can OHIP still be paying for that? I also can't count the number of terminal cancer patients with extremely limited life expectancies who I was forced to admit to the ICU for treatments that seemed very inappropriate to me. Then there are the psychiatric patients who self-harm and then consume huge amounts of government resources. One I knew was in a burns ICU for months after having self-inflicted a massive burn with toilet-bowl cleaner. That patient continues to self-harm and come back for surgeries to repair the damage. Another repeatedly stabs themselves in the stomach, necessitating trip after trip to the OR and long hospital stays to recover. There's also the alcoholic with terrible cirrhosis who won't stop drinking, but comes to hospital every 2 weeks to have their ascites drained. And the patient who drinks ethylene glycol and puts themselves on hemodialysis for the rest of their life.
I truly don't understand why the people who have brought illnesses on themselves, or who have other conditions that may not be universally recognized as diseases (mental illness, alcoholism) should have their health needs paid for by OHIP, yet my infertility and that of my husband are not recognized and covered in the same way.
People are very quick to say that we should just adopt, as if that's such an easy or inexpensive option. Or that we should just resign ourselves to being childless and live a happy life child-free. That's easier said than done, believe me.
People claim that covering IVF would be terribly expensive, yet it would be cheaper in the long run than paying for the babies born from multiple pregnancies that result from infertility treatment. And it would certainly be much more equitable that the system currently is.
If we can cover things like cleft lip and palate surgery, which are surely not life-saving, but definitely improve quality of life, surely we can pay to help infertile couples have the children they so desperately want in the safest and best way possible.
Imagine the heartache I feel, having watched my brother and sister-in-law start trying to conceive when we did, followed by the births of not one, but two nephews. They are currently 21 weeks pregnant with their first daughter, who is due the very day our first child was to have been born.
I pay taxes, I contribute to society, and I think that my (and my husband's) medical problem of infertility deserves to be treated like any other disease by OHIP. We've done nothing to deserve this, and would be extremely grateful to have at least some of the financial burden taken away from us.
Sincerely, Kate XXXX, MD