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If You Are Unable To Find A 'Suitable Sexual Partner', WHO May Classify You As 'Disabled'

It's all for a good cause.
Everyone will get the right to start a family under new definition of infertility.
Aapthamithra
Everyone will get the right to start a family under new definition of infertility.

The World Health Organization is making a change in its definition of 'infertility'. Until now, WHO considered the failure to achieve pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sex as 'infertility'. Now, they want to classify infertility as disability.

That's not all.

In a new set of guidelines, WHO has announced that the inability to find a suitable sexual partner – or the lack of sexual relationships which could achieve conception – could be considered an equal disability, reports The Telegraph.

Before you start hating WHO, here's the thing. They are trying to change the definition for a good cause.

Through this change, WHO want to grant everyone the "right to reproduce". This move will help heterosexual single men and women, as well as same-sex couples, get equal access to in vitro fertilization.

"The definition of infertility is now written in such a way that it includes the rights of all individuals to have a family, and that includes single men, single women, gay men, gay women," Dr David Adamson, one of the authors of the new standards, told The Telegraph.

"It puts a stake in the ground and says an individual's got a right to reproduce whether or not they have a partner," he added.

However, there have been critics of the move too.

Josephine Quintavalle, the founder of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, an international think tank that deals with the problems related to the practice of in vitro fertilization told Express that this is "absurd nonsense."

"This absurd nonsense is not simply re-defining infertility but completely side-lining the biological process and significance of natural intercourse between a man and a woman," she said.

The rule, though not official yet, will be sent out to every health minister next year. However, it's unclear at this point how it could actually affect law or policy from country to country.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.