IVF Baby Boom: Births From Fertility Procedures Hit New High
By Michaeleen Doucleff,
NPR
| 02. 18. 2014
More couples than ever are turning to in vitro fertilization to help build families.
In 2012, more than 61,000 babies were conceived with the help of IVF, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported Monday.
That means IVF babies made up 1.5 percent of the 3.9 million births in the U.S, the agency wrote on its website. And it makes 2012 the biggest year for IVF on record: Doctors performed the most procedures and delivered the most IVF babies.
Over the past decade, the number of IVF treatments has been rising. Doctors performed about 113,000 cycles back in 2003. That number jumped by nearly 50 percent to about 165,000 in 2012.
"A lot of individuals — specifically women — are choosing to develop their careers, and they're having great opportunities, " says Charles Coddington III, an OB-GYN at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and president of SART. "So a lot of them are getting older before they have children, and they are needing more IVF services."
At the same time, the number of high-risk multiple births from the treatment...
Related Articles
By Matthew Rozsa, Salon | 09.15.2024
When a person with a uterus decides to freeze their eggs, any number of things can go wrong. Ice crystal can form, killing an otherwise viable ovum. A fertilized egg may fail to properly implant, or the egg may...
By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
Image by Stephen Andrews from Unsplash
Yale agreed on Monday to pay dozens of patients who had filed lawsuits claiming that they had endured excruciatingly painful egg retrieval procedures after a nurse at its fertility clinic secretly swapped their anesthesia...
By Ari Schulman, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
There was immediate backlash when Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization qualified as children under the state’s wrongful death law. But it was a backlash as much from the right as from the...
By Megan Agnew, The Times | 09.15.2024
Faith Hartley always wanted two girls — a blonde and a redhead. “I thought, I’ll have one that looks like me,” says Hartley, 35, smoothing her golden hair in the Los Angeles valley home she shares with her husband, Neil...