Petri Dish Babies, 25 Years Later

bl8n8r writes ""You can't buy a baby in the United States," said Caplan. "... But you can buy the sperm, you can buy the egg and you can rent the uterus." So, what I want to know is if it's cheaper than my current apartment, and if utilities are included :D" See also a good story about IVF in the Mercury News.

Comments

Interesting IVF facts

[Alton_Brown]

More interesting facts...

• The size of a human egg is approximately 0.15 mm in diameter. That is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
• The size of a human sperm is approximately 0.004 mm in diameter.
• Infertility affects 6.1 million American women and their partners, about 10% of the reproductive age population.
• Infertility is a disease of the reproductive system that affects the male or female with almost equal frequency.
• Fewer than 5% of infertile couples in treatment actually use IVF. IVF is usually the treatment of choice for a woman with blocked, severely damaged, or absent fallopian tubes. IVF is also used to circumvent infertility caused by endometriosis or a male factor. Many programs also use IVF to treat couples with unexplained infertility of long duration who have failed with other infertility treatments.
• IVF is a method of assisted reproduction in which the man's sperm and the woman's egg (oocyte) are combined in a laboratory dish, where fertilization occurs. The resulting embryo is then transferred to the uterus to develop naturally. Usually, two to four embryos are transferred with each cycle.
• According to the latest statistics, the success rate for IVF is 29.4% deliveries per egg retrieval. This success rate is similar to the 20% chance that a healthy, reproductively normal couple has of achieving a pregnancy that results in a live born baby in any given month.
• Women under 35, without male factor, who try IVF, have on average a 25% chance of conceiving and having a baby. Some clinics achieve even better results.
• Success with IVF increases with the number of cycles attempted up to four cycles.
• Of the 82% of pregnancies as a result of IVF that result in a live birth, about 63% are singletons, 32% are twins, and 5% are triplets or more.
• Studies suggest that ICSI and in vitro fertilization are safe technologies. A recent study covered nearly 1,000 children conceived through these methods in five European countries and found that the children, measured from birth to age 5, were as healthy as children conceived naturally. While other studies have found a slightly increased risk of genetic defects and gene-imprinting disorders in children conceived through ART, more research needs to be done to determine the risks and the processes by which this might occur.
• IVF was successfully used for the first time in the United States in 1981. Since then, more than 114,000 babies in the US have been born as a result of the technique.
• One cycle of IVF costs an average of $12,400.
  IVF has reduced the number of tubal surgeries by 50%.

Nova's coverage

[ajs]

Nova recently had a great episode about IVF and other techniques. Some of it was actually kind of scary, like the tech in a fertility clinic who explained why multiple births are so common. His take was that it's all market pressure. If women look at the statistics for a fertility clinic, they will see that some percentage of all IVFs resulted in birth. Well, if you cram 5 viable eggs back in, instead of 2, you *are* more likely to get multiples, but you're also less likely to damage your success record in terms of viable implantations....

Check out Wired

[Flamed to a Crisp]

In the August issue of Wired magazine, there was quite a disgusting infoporn about how you could sell your body for $46 million. It priced egg cells at $7,000/egg and sperm at $75/donation.

Re:IVT et al.

[Anonymous Coward]

A woman's fertility declines remarkably with age. Many women decide to have it all (career etc.) and put off having children thinking they can do so when in their late 30s or early 40s at least. Chances of getting pregnant begin to decline sharply sometime in the 30s. Also, infertility was probably more taboo in the past than it is now, so you hear about it more.

Re:Becoming more common every day

[TopShelf]

They're not that much more common that they would throw the statistics off by much (most likely something near 0.8% as opposed to 1%).

Re:This is going to cause trouble...

[whorfin]

This is actually somewhat of a misconception.

IANAD, but I've consulted with a highly respected fertility doctor on this topic.

Although there is a somewhat higher chance for 'complications' with IVF than other forms of pregnancy, that is most heavily influenced by the age of the mother, and the effect of natural radiation on the genetic matierial in the egg, since they've all been around as long as the woman has been alive.

If the egg is donated, the complication rate is controlled by the age of the woman the egg came from, not from the age of the woman carrying the pregnancy. For this reason, Egg donors need to be in the 'prime' youth fertility years.

There are, additionally, drugs that the woman can take that will make her 'superfertile' by releasing multiple eggs per monthly cycle, and the skilled doctor can select those that are most healthy for fertilization and ultimately implantation. The complication rates for this type of fertilization have been dropping as the technology and techniques have matured.

If and as the technology improves, I wouldn't be surprised to see IVF used in the future as a method for making sure that healthy young (affluent) women have the healthiest children possible, by genetically screening out the 'bad eggs' and 'bad seed' prior to conception. Right now it's a crapshoot.

Re:mod me down now...

[bourne]

Call me crazy, but it seems a lot better to adopt a child than go to all of this trouble.

Have you ever looked into the adoption process to see what's involved? From your comment above, I seriously doubt it.

Let's see... with IVF you're looking at $10-12k for a child (paid for by insurance in a small minority of US states) which has a genetic relation to you, where the odds are very high that pregnancy will result in birth, where you can breastfeed (which has significant advantages over formula, marketing to the contrary), where you get to bond and care for it from day 1. In the other corner, adoption costs $25-$35k and can take two or three years. There is a significant possiblity that that you can be all ready to adopt when the birth mother changes her mind - or that she can change her mind after you've taken the baby, in some states. Or, with foreign babies, you might have to adopt a 6-month old because its home country requires it stay in an orphanage for 6 months before being adopted, meaning that you miss the most important bonding period. And you may or may not know what drugs, alcohol, or smoke the baby was exposed to in utero. And, for all you know, the parents are dumb as a post and ugly as bricks.

In fact it seems downright selfish that one would rather spend tons of money rather than adopt a child that already exists. It seems so selfish that I might go so far as to argue that perhaps this desire that the child must be mine mine mine might go so far as to make people bad parents due to the fact that they are so slefish thinking of thier own needs and wants and are unable to love a child just becuse it doe snot have their DNA.

Based on this, I gather that NOT ONLY have you not been involved in one of these decisions, you don't know any parents of IVF children. I know many, and I have never ever met one who was as narcissistic as you describe; most of them quite the opposite.

Now before I'm modded as a troll.

You're not a troll, you're just making uninformed suppositions.

Why is the idea of adoption so repellant that one would rather go through such effort to create a child?

It isn't repellent. But it has a number of disadvantages relative to IVF, which makes IVF a rational choice for many people. There are a lot of selfish behaviors in the modern world - IVF is not one of them. It involves pain and sacrifice and courage that people who haven't done it can't imagine.