New Ways to Help You Get Pregnant From bankrolling in-vitro fertilization to putting your best egg forward, advances in medicine and technology could have you advancing toward the labor and delivery unit. By Keri Foy
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fter I got pregnant with my first, I thought getting pregnant again would be a piece of baby shower cake. Not true. Turns out, I wasn’t producing enough progesterone and needed to take a supplement to sustain a pregnancy. The truth is that just because you’ve had one child, the second isn’t a shoo-in. “About half my patients are women who already have one child,” says Dr. Sherif Awadalla, the medical director for the Institute of Reproductive Health in Cincinnati. The path to pregnancy isn’t always straightforward. In fact, about one in 10 women have impaired fertility, according to the CDC. After two miscarriages, Leigh Ann Burckhardt, mom of two, took shots once a day, then twice daily after 35 weeks to prevent blood clots. “If you’re having problems, I think a woman should get a second opinion,” Leigh Ann says. Our stories of trial and error in the quest to have babies seem more common. Chandler, a character from the TV sitcom Friends, eloquently explained his wife’s desire
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for a child with this simple sentence: “She’s a mother… without a baby.” Advances in fertility can help those “moms without babies” get and stay pregnant. Here are the four latest trends in fertility treatments.
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Genetic testing takes the guesswork out of embryo selection
Three years ago, doctors chose embryos to implant for invitro fertilization (IVF) based on looks alone. But like the old saying goes, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. New genetic testing on embryos now screens all the embryo’s chromosomes to determine if it’s genetically normal before IVF. Estimated to cost around $5,000, this test helps doctors select the best embryo, which decreases the likelihood of a miscarriage because of chromosomal abnormalities. “If you’ve got seven embryos ready for IVF, we can now literally handpick the embryo that has the best chance of surviving,” says Dr. Johanna Archer from Fertility First, who is the only female board-certified reproductive endocrinologist in Kentucky.
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