IVF

The birth of the world's test tube baby heralded a new era of fertility treatment, and thirty years on 12,000 IVF babies are born every year in Britain alone.
The development of In Vitro Fertilisation, or IVF as it is commonly known, meant doctors could fertilise a woman's egg in a laboratory, before placing it in her womb to develop.

Since Doctors Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards artificially orchestrated the birth of Louise Brown, IVF has undergone a substantial amount of progress.

An Australian couple is seeking the right to determine the sex of their unborn child.

The couple has three boys already and lost a daughter shortly after birth. Since the loss of their daughter, the couple has tried to conceive a baby girl again with the help of IVF.

The couple’s quest became controversial when they announced that they had aborted twin boys in their quest to have a baby girl. A decision the couple described as “traumatic.”

Egg Donation - Alot is currently being said about egg donors and their "place" in this world of third party family building. First, we had Melanie Thernstrom and her "twiblings", then we are seeing the reinvigeration of "Eggsploitation." I actually congratulate Jennifer Lahl on winning a California Independent Film Award, as her film is creating a discourse that is needed, albeit on the sensational side.

QUESTION: My husband has two sister's who both have offered to be egg donors for us. One is 28 and the other is 45. When it comes to things like Down Syndrome and other birth defects, is it the egg or the gestational surrogate that would determine the health of the child? Also if bipolar and depression run in the family - would that be something else we should be concerned about? Or would it be better to just seek out a egg donor to have a child?

Web resource based on five years of medical records aims to tell women their likelihood of giving birth with 99% accuracy
Women hoping to have a baby through fertility treatment can from today use an online calculator to show them how likely they are to succeed.

IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) is expensive, only sometimes available on the NHS and less successful than many people think.

IVF - Researchers have developed a new model that better predicts the success of IVF treatment.

To create the new model “144,018 treatment cycles were prospectively studied to determine how couples' baseline characteristics might influence the probabilities of live birth and adverse perinatal outcomes.”

Women who have one embryo transferred during IVF treatment are five times more likely to give birth to a healthy baby than those who receive two embryos, research shows today.
Those who have two embryos are more likely to get pregnant but are at greater risk of delivering a premature or low-weight child, researchers found.