04/02/2026
Yesterday, 3 February, our own Bojana Santic participated in the "Towards an EU Strategy for Women's Health" event, delivering a speech from the perspective of patients with infertility.
One of the key challenges in our field is that fertility and infertility are still treated as private or marginal issues, despite the fact that infertility affects 1 in 6 people, over 25 million people in the EU.
While women and men are diagnosed in roughly equal numbers, infertility is not experienced equally. The physical, emotional and financial burden still falls disproportionately on women, reflecting deeper structural inequalities in health systems, access to care and the labour market.
This is why we strongly welcome the way the Strategy reframes fertility, recognising it as part of women’s health across the life course and as a structural gender equality issue, not a niche or private concern.
This approach opens space for prevention, early information and fertility literacy, while aligning health, equality and social policies to reduce inequalities and rebuild trust in health systems.
Addressing this requires sustained funding, cross-sector coordination and the meaningful involvement of patient organisations. Fertility must be embedded not only in health policy, but also in equality, employment and social frameworks.
In this context, Fertility Europe, together with its partners in the Coalition for Fertility, has contributed to the European Commission’s consultation, calling for fertility care to be recognised as a core gender equality issue.
Despite the scale of the issue, stigma persists, and inequalities - with all their consequences - are still a lived experience for many women.
That is why Fertility Europe strongly endorses a reframing of (in)fertility, recognising it as a structural issue and a core matter of gender equality.
