Dying For A Baby
August 30th 2009 (repeated September 5th)
Producer: Orla Barry

IVF, long associated with career women in the western world, is booming in Uganda. Despite having one of the highest fertility rates in the world, private clinics are seeing massive increases in business from Ugandan women desperate to conceive. Infertility in Uganda is a dangerous position for any woman to find herself in with immediate divorce and rejection by her family almost guaranteed. Many turn to witch doctors in the hope of a cure. Men who are infertile will usually simply deny it. Now measures are being undertaken to introduce low cost IVF to Africa. Orla Barry meets the doctor who faciliated the birth of the first IVF baby (“baby created without sex”), she comes across a woman moments after she has given birth after ten years trying. One Ugandan man talks of the shame of his infertility and the secret trips he and his wife take to the IVF clinics.