Using the Help of an Ivf Treatment

Infertility can be a difficult word to wrap the brain around. Finding out that a couple might be infertile can be a scary thing to deal with. Infertility is the inability for either the man, the woman, or both to contribute to the conception process. This means that the man’s sperm is not working effectively or the woman’s eggs or uterus are not working effectively. To be infertile could also mean that the woman cannot carry a pregnancy to full term. Infertility doesn’t have to stop a couple from trying to have baby though. There are other options such as surrogacy, tubal reversal, using a donor egg or donor sperm, and IVF treatment.

IVF treatment is also referred to as in vitro fertilization. In vitro fertilization is when the egg of a woman is fertilized with sperm outside of the body and then placed back inside the woman’s uterus to hopefully provide a successful pregnancy. This type of infertility treatment is usually used once all of the other available treatments have been found to be unsuccessful in creating a pregnancy. The ovulatory process is controlled with hormones and the egg is removed from the body and fertilized in a liquid medium with the sperm.

In vitro is derived from Latin and it means ‘in glass.’ The fertilization process does take place in a glass test tube or on a glass petri dish. In vitro is used because the procedure takes place not only in glass but also outside of the body as compared to in vivo. In vivo is a procedure that occurs inside the body without anything being removed. An IVF treatment is usually the last method of pregnancy that an infertile couple will attempt to get pregnant after all of the other options have already been ruled out.
The entire process of an IVF treatment can take anywhere from four to six weeks to complete because the woman’s cycle must be monitored and it must be stimulated with hormones before anything else can happen. There really is no age limit when it comes to performing in vitro fertilization but many doctors recommend that women do not have the procedure performed if they are over the age of 45 because the risk of it not working effectively becomes much greater. The procedure worked if a pregnancy test is positive within 10-14 days of the fertilization taking place and the procedure didn’t work if the pregnancy test is negative two weeks after the fertilization took place.

In vitro fertilization is still considered a hit or miss procedure by the medical industry because no one really knows whether or not it will be a success. Some raw data show that the success rate is anywhere from 10-20 percent and sometimes even less than that. Also, there is a 1 in 90 chance that the woman will have twins from this procedure. Any woman with damaged, blocked, or absent fallopian tubes can have in vitro fertilization performed. These procedures are not covered under most health insurance plans, so the patient will need to pay for it out of pocket, and they are quite expensive so consult a physician before making a decision.