Marblehead, Mass- They may not agree on everything, but Salem Congressman Seth Moulton and anti-tax crusader Barbara Anderson see eye-to-eye when it comes to having the Department of Veterans Affairs pay for expensive in vitro fertilization (IVF) for veterans wounded in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to help them start new families.
Tag: Iraq
VA Cannot Pay for Fertility Treatments for Injured Veterans
Current federal law does not allow the Department of Veterans Affairs to pay for the treatments. The current law went into effect 23 years ago, but is now being challenged from both sides of the political aisle, as injured heroes from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars try to have children.
An Unspoken Peril For Our Injured Troops: Infertility
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.
Wounded Troops Battle Obstacles to Sex and Intimacy
Aaron Causey is among an unprecedented number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans — 1,291 — who received devastating injuries to their groins, genitalia, bowels, buttocks and urinary tracts and lived to endure the recovery, from ongoing struggles with the psychological impact of losing all or a portion of one’s penis or testicles to sexual dysfunction, infertility and other medical concerns.