The comment regarding "singling out" women for infertility is an interesting one, but it ignores a crucial fact: women who want to get pregnant are in no physical danger by failing to do so. And some of them, no matter how much they spend or how much they do, will never get pregnant. And you know what? They will continue to live and be and progress until they die, just like the rest of us. I'm sorry, but I don't see an individual's desire as the guiding principal for inclusion in insurance. And fertility is not an entitlement.

(As an aside, I am positively appalled by a friend of mine's adoption process, which reflects how some people are incapable of separating their desire for what's best for us as a society. My progressive, liberal friend now has issues with Plan B, because it has reduced the supply of white infants available for her to adopt. Missing entirely, of course, that fewer children to allocate from their birth parents and to others is a good thing for our society.)

Articles such as this go on a variety of assumptions that our society promotes -- that a family progresses by producing and raising children, that a woman's value is in her uterus, and that it is tragic, indeed, not to give birth. I don't agree with any of these beliefs. And so, naturally, I cannot support paying for other people to act under them.

Furthermore, I am myself a child born of extensive, expensive, and entirely elective fertility treatment. I am medically fragile, and though I can have healthy children I have been advised not to and have agreed with that assessment. So I am not speaking without knowledge of the situation at hand. I have known other women who make different choices facing similar medical scenarios -- women who conceive when it is medically irresponsible for them to do so and women who engage in high-risk pregnancies which are likely to produce medically fragile children. In my opinion these are irresponsible choices -- I wouldn't make them and I'd rather not subsidize them.

P.S. re: adoption, the market is quite variable, and unfortunately it's an industry as well. So...costs are quite steep for "desirable" children and far lower or nonexistent or even subsidized for comparatively "undesirable" children. But adoption in general is far more economically attainable than is generally understood.

First, no one has demonstrated the essential nature of biological child bearing at all -- merely their extreme desire to engage in it and the fact that is expensive.

Second, someone referred to childbearing as an important duty with some legal ramifications. In my opinion that's a legal and social problem, and that problem should be corrected.

Jeanette, I understand and get that infertile people are suffering, and realizing great anguish from their condition. I quibble, however, with the idea that infertility is a tragedy and that we as a society should erase it at all costs rather than looking at secondary factors, such as emotional/mental issues or societal expectations.

I say this as someone who is about 1/3rd through the adoption process, and who is technically capable of childbearing. But in my case it is ill-advised, and I've chosen to abide by that. I know many women who do not choose that, and I feel for them greatly, but I also think we as a society should examine why they feel that risking their lives to conceive and give birth (in some cases to children whose health will be greatly compromised) is a good idea. Or even, to take Reader's Digest as a regular example, why it is noble and desirable. Why do they believe that they must suffer so much in order to produce a child of their own genetic makeup? Why do we place such a premium on the unborn and even unconceived, and so little on the women who are already living?

Finally, people in general seem unable to distinguish between a keen desire and an essential need. Food, shelter, and basic freedoms are essential. The ability to have as many children as you would like when you would like to have them is a desire, and as such I would prefer that it not be subsidized.