More and more couples today are turning to in vitro fertilization (IVF) to have a baby. But are there drawbacks?
Time magazine reports on IVF treatment.
Countless couples today turn to IVF treatment to have a baby. More people are focusing on their career first, getting married later and thus having kids later. But research shows that women only have a twenty percent chance of getting pregnant after the age of thirty- that is why many are now turning to IVF.
“The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology–which pulls data from the majority of U.S. IVF clinics–finds that clinics performed 165,172 fertility procedures in 2012 including IVF. This led to 61,740 babies, an increase of approximately 2,000 children from IVF treatments in 2011. A record 1.5% of babies born in 2012 were due to IVF procedures,” according to Time.
But the treatment also has its drawbacks. One IVF treatment can cause upwards of $12,500 and it is not always successful. It depends on the age of the woman. IVF is generally much more fruitful for women under the age of thirty-five. The other drawback is that IVF can sometimes cause cancers and other diseases, but the risk of this is minimal.
CNN also reported on IVF and offered statistics, “Looking only at the IVF treatments that used fresh embryos from non-donor eggs, the number of women under the age of 35 who gave birth using IVF was about 40%, compared with only 31% for women between the ages of 35 and 37. Only 3.9% of 42-year-olds got pregnant as a result of IVF treatment. The number of multiple embryos being transferred in IVF treatments has also declined, according to the report. Doctors prefer that women give birth to a single baby or ‘singleton,’ as they are called in medical lingo.”
