The proposal was contained in guidelines published by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, which issues rules governing health service operations.
A final set of guidelines will be published next February, but Tuesday's report means the government is one step closer to offering free IVF treatment across England and Wales.
Couples diagnosed as infertile would be eligible for up to three cycles of IVF treatment, and embryos created during those cycles could also be frozen for future use.
Fertility doctors have hailed the development, as have infertile couples that decry the current partial health service coverage. Advocates of free IVF say women are currently subjected to a "postcode lottery," meaning covered treatments vary depending upon where a couple lives.
"The system we have right now is iniquitous," said Dr. Simon Fishel, director of the Centres for Assisted Reproduction, one of the largest and most well known IVF clinics in the country.
"Infertility is a medical condition affecting huge numbers of people, not only here but worldwide," Fishel said by phone from his office in Nottingham, England. "But there has been a denial that this condition exists and has to be treated.
"The IVF treatment is a proper and efficient therapy for childlessness and infertility," Fishel said.
Fishel said it could be years before the guidelines are put into practice and warned patients against waiting for treatment until it becomes free. The plan now goes into a public consultation phase and eventually must win the approval of government ministers.
"We are some way off from this actually being implemented," Fishel said.
The plan also has its opponents, including pro-life and reproductive watchdog groups that argue against IVF and say that free treatment will be expensive and could potentially take cash away from other medically important therapies.
Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE) said that the root causes of infertility in couples and in society at large need to be treated.
When parts of the draft guidelines were leaked to the press earlier this month, CORE estimated that if all couples currently undergoing private IVF treatment in Britain turned to the National Health Service, the additional bill to taxpayers would amount to about $650 million a year.
Quintavalle and other pro-life activists believe that IVF does not provide an adequate solution to infertility and object to the creation of "surplus embryos" on moral grounds.
"We want people to be able to have children," Quinatville said. "(But) we have to cure the infertility and not offer IVF.
"We have serious objections to the creation of extra embryos, which are then killed or used in experiments, and I don't think those things can be brushed under the carpet," Quintaville said.
See Earlier Story:
Free Fertility Treatment Proposed in Britain (Aug. 14, 2003)
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