Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Chief of Staff Peta Credlin spoke last night about her battle to conceive a child using IVF amidst the brutal and sometimes Byzantine politics of the national parliament.
Speaking at the highly anticipated Australian Women’s Weekly Qantas 2015 Power List function last night, the former political staffer, 45, said that she had simply assumed the treatment would be successful.
“I think that, with myself, I thought it [conception] would just happen,’ Ms Credlin told the audience at The Art Gallery of NSW. “I thought it would just come together like everything else in my life had come together.”
Peta went through five cycles of IVF treatment during a three year period, all while performing one of the most high-profile and demanding political jobs in the country.
“I felt really strongly about it because I battled with IVF for three years in one of the toughest jobs in this country.”
Ms Credlin revealed in a 2013 interview that Tony Abbott had been personally very supportive of her IVF efforts, even offering her his bar fridge to store IVF drugs and the use of his private bathroom where she could inject them.
She said that she brought up her IVF experience in that interview – the only interview she’d done in 16 years in politics – because she had never heard of IVF failures, only successes.
“Anyone who’s ever talked about IVF had a baby, and it had all been okay,” she said.
“So I suddenly thought ‘there’s something wrong with me. How do you keep going with this load?’
“And there was a bit of talk in Canberra that I was doing IVF and there was a little insider gossip and that it meant that someone would get my job and they were jostling for my job and I decided to be just out there and I was.
“It was pretty tough. I got criticised for talking about stuff that’s personal. I think everyone else had a go at talking about me and personal things, and I thought it wasn’t that bad but I wanted to be the voice, at least for my part, for women that aren’t successful [at IVF], and they don’t feel there’s anyone there.”
Average IVF success rates for a fresh embryo transfer vary from 50 per cent for women under 30 years of age to 20 per cent for women over 40 years of age. Peta was in that 20 per cent band.
Once a woman passes the age of 35, the quality of her eggs begins to diminish and it becomes increasingly more difficult to conceive. IVF gives a woman another chance at conception using an implanted donor egg.
But there are no guarantees. Many professional woman enter fertility treatment assuming that they will be able to fall pregnant once they start treatment but age and individual factors sometimes means that doesn’t happen.
