Last month, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates Britain's fertility industry, ordered private and the National Health Service (NHS) clinics to stop treating patients who are in the middle of an in-vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle. All new treatments had also been banned. Experts believed that this decision would prevent the birth of at least 20,000 babies if the policy were to stay in place for 12 months. But on May 1, the fertility regulator did a U-turn, lifting the suspension of fertility services, provided they were taking safety precautions for both doctors and patients.

The conundrum is more or less the same in Mumbai. Much before the Janata Curfew was imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 22, a few fertility clinics in Mumbai had already shuttered. Dr Firuza Parikh, director, Assisted Reproduction and Genetics at Jaslok Hospital and Research Centre, says, "A week before the nationwide lockdown, Jaslok shut its fertility clinic for two reasons. We wanted to ensure the safety of our patients since we did not know what course the infection was going to take in Mumbai or Maharashtra. Second, we thought the government needs hospitals and healthcare workers to tend to COVID patients. We didn't want to sap resources including anaesthesia medicines, medical talent, etc., which could otherwise have been used to contain the spread of Coronavirus. We decided to pass on all the resources from our inventory to the ICU. The supply chain of PPEs had not started then, so this felt like the right thing to do."