Pregnancy Week By Week

The truth is far more prosaic.  There have been 5 million births that used new fertility methods, and the rates of multiple births have soared in response to the increased use of fertility drugs.  However, many of the other changes in reproductive technology heralded by the media are either impossible in reality, or have yet to become practical or affordable. 

According to pregnancy researcher Sarah Franklin, recent press reports that we will be able to choose children with certain genetic characteristics are nonsensical.  The most that technology can accomplish today in that direction is to discard artificially embryos that contain the genetic markers of possible disease. 

Bonnie Steinbeck, a biomedical ethics professor at the University of Albany who specializes in reproduction,  told "LiveScience.com"  that parents can only screen for one genetic trait;  the gender of their baby.  However, this requires that the parents be willing to throw away viable embryos with the wrong reproductive organs. 

Some urban legends about fertility treatment have emerged since the development of PGD (Preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a genetic screening technique that fertility experts can use to find out if the embryos produced by IVF are at risk of a serious genetic disease.  The purpose of PGD is to test embryos for the few diseases that result from one misbegotten gene.  However, Sarah Franklin points out that PGD is unpopular because of possible complications, such as contamination, misdiagnosis and risk to the embryo. 

Moreover, most of the measurable traits that people have, from height to intelligence, are a complex product of the interaction between environment and genetic predispositions, so it is quite simply impossible to select embryos for these traits.   Franklin explains that dogs and cats have been cloned,  and the clones develop differently.  Some even have different eye colors. 

The public's perceptions of fertility treatments are right on one broad count.  A fairly broad range of treatments exists, most of which have been developed in the last thirty years.   These treatments can involve oral medications, injections, surgery, or complex procedures like in vitro fertilization, known as IVF.  However, not all methods are used with equal frequency.  85% to 90% of infertile couples receive low-tech treatments, like medication or surgery, and less than 3% are treated with Assisted Reproductive Technologies, like IVF.   Of those treated for infertility, two-thirds will go onto have a baby.

New technologies such as IVF, in fact, have relatively low success rates.  According to Debora Spar, president of Barnard and author of "The Baby Business,"  newspapers tend to publish only the happily-ever-after stories about fertility treatments,  but it is far more common for such treatments to fail.   The American Fertility Association reports that women over 32 are less responsive to treatment than their younger peers.  Only 1 in 20 women over 40 is able to bear a child from her own eggs using IVF.  For this reason, doctors often choose to insert several viable embryos into the woman's uterus.

In cases where a woman is short on eggs, she would need to get them from another woman, and the easiest way to obtain them is by buying eggs on the open market.  According to Spar,  infertile mothers cringe at the idea that there is a market in human eggs,  because they don't like to mix up "dirty" money with their "pure" love for children.  Nonetheless,  college campuses are replete with advertisements by couples who are willing to pay as much as $50000 for an egg produced by a young, healthy female college student. 

Egg sellers are usually women in their twenties who are willing to put their own bodies in danger -- sometimes risking infertility, even dying -- in order to make a five figure profit from their eggs.   The harvesting process is dangerous:  it can over-stimulate the ovaries, making them virtually explode into the surrounding organs.  Researchers at NIH (National Institute of Health) have shown that for one in ten women,  in particular those in their 20s and 30s,   overstimulation of ovaries to obtain eggs can lead to these complications.  The symptoms can be mild or severe, and they include the swelling of the abdomen and difficulties with breathing. Sarah Franklin explains that these symptoms can, in rare occasions,  kill women who attempt IVF. 

Even if a woman who's chosen IVF has managed to avoid the side effects,  she must nonetheless take one set of hormones to inactivate her fertility cycle, and another to increase her production of eggs and align her cycle with that of her egg donor.  The hormone treatment continues during implantation and pregnancy, and can have severe side effects. 

The final problem with IVF is its effects on the child's sense of identity,  according to Spar.   No one knows what the psychological consequences are for a child who traces her birth to a test tube birth.    Nor is it often possible for these egg-donor children to discover their true genetic identities, since fertility banks rarely keep track of their egg donors.  Thus, the long-term problems with IVF may come to resemble those of children who were adopted and never found their birth parents. 

*This article is based on the information at http://infertility.about.com, http://www.babycenter.com, http://www.livescience.com/health/090303-fertility-treatment-myths.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_treatment