Our blog is dedicated to what we can do to optimize fertility and help with the ultimate goal of bringing home a healthy child. Although there are lots of ways to build a family, many patients use IVF. In IVF, we use medications to grow multiple eggs at the same time with the hope of developing multiple embryos in the lab. Once we have a healthy embryo, we use embryo transfer to get our patients pregnant.
One baby at a time is always the safest thing for mom and baby.
When IVF first started, the success rates were low, so it was common for clinics to place multiple embryos back in with the hope of one of them sticking. Now that our field’s success rates are much better, we need to step back and look at the goal that our patients ask us to help them with on the initial patient consultation: building a healthy family.
Although success rates vary based on individual clinics, I work for a clinic that has the highest live birth rate in the nation. This means that the majority of patients get pregnant and bring home a healthy child later that year from the first embryo transfer. This also means that if we put back two embryos, there will be twins, but possibly even more, like triplets or even quadruplets.
One baby at a time is always the safest thing for mom and baby.
Multiple pregnancies, like twins, are higher risk for just about everything. Children from a multiple pregnancy are higher risk being stillborn, having a birth defect, developing autism, prolonged admission to the neonatal ICU, and cerebral palsy than single babies. For moms of multiples, they are at higher risk of developing severe complications including life-threatening conditions like pre-eclampsia, diabetes of pregnancy, and delivering preterm.
One baby at a time is always the safest thing for mom and baby.
Infertility treatments like IVF are expensive, both emotionally and financially. Putting back more than one embryo at a time will not save you money. It won’t get you that healthy family sooner. In fact, multiple studieshave shown that because of the higher risks of complications to mom and baby, these pregnanciescost much more than one pregnancy at a time.
That is why, in our practice, the majority of patients get one embryo transferred at a time. The average number of embryos transferred in our practice is 1.1. We are very proud of this! Other clinics are doing this across the countrytoo. Together, we are helping develop a generation of healthier moms and babies.
Take home points:
- One baby at a time is always the safest thing for mom and baby.
- Talk to your doctor if you have more questions
Enhancing Fertility 