An Unspoken Peril For Our Injured Troops: Infertility
“We were trying to improve the Afghan children’s lives — and now I’m not even sure I can have children.” (Photo: Getty Images)
Yesterday marked the twelfth anniversary of the Operation Iraqi freedom and the start of the extended military presence of United States military officials in Iraq. A 2008 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 15 percent of soldiers deployed in Iraq suffered an injury that involved loss of consciousness, a figure that extrapolates out to 480,000 affected Iraq veterans.
Such injuries, often from roadside bombs or improvised explosive devices (IEDs), can cause a kind of injury often left un-discussed: Infertility.
In a 2011 story in Men’s Health, Army Captain Derick Carver recounts his experience after being seriously injured by an IED in Afghanistan. As Carver puts it, not only were his legs “destroyed,” but his “scrotum had to be cut open because the trauma of the blast was filling it with blood.”
“We were trying to improve the Afghan children’s lives,” Carver told Men’s Health, “And now I’m not even sure I can have children.” And yet while Tricare, the insurance provider offered to active military personnel and their families, covers the diagnosis and treatment of causes of infertility, it does not cover in vitro fertilization (IVF) itself — often the only medical technology that would allow those with these kinds of injuries to be able to conceive biological children.
IVF costs, on average $12,000 per cycle, making the procedure cost-prohibitive for many service members and veterans.
But Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), a senior member of the Senate Budget Committee, is seeking to change this. On Thursday she introduced an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2016 Budget Resolution that was voted on by voice and adopted unanimously to provide additional resources and support services for veterans and active service members, including access to fertility treatment through the Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) for the critically injured.
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“It is long past time for those departments to provide these types of modern medicine” so that critically injured veterans and service members can “realize their dreams of starting families,” said Murray in her remarks announcing the amendment. “We are moving in the right direction in fixing some of the problems our veterans face — but the work is far from over…. I know this is a priority we should all agree on.”
This is not the first time Murray has taken up the issue of fertility and family-building for veterans.
Just last month, she introduced the Women Veterans and Families Health Services Act of 2015 in the Senate, allowing the DoD and VA to provide assisted reproductive technologies, including in vitro fertilization (IVF), to veterans and active military personnel who have suffered catastrophic wounds that would prevent them from starting families and end the ban on offering in vitro services through the VA.
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As noted by Resolve, the National Infertility Association, “Though DoD can provide IVF treatment, too many service members are excluded from eligibility for this and other treatments.” The bill would also offer “adoption assistance [and] permanent authority for VA to provide child care.”
Representative Rick Larsen (D-WA) went on to introduce the Women Veterans and Families Health Services Act of 2015 in the House, saying in a statement, “Disabled veterans have already paid too high a price in service to our nation. Veterans deserve access to advanced fertility treatment and adoption assistance so they can achieve their dreams of starting families.”
