Reply to Amy Coney Barrett and IVF

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]IVF doesn’t HAVE to result in the destruction of embryos, right? [/quote]

Sure, everyone can be Octomom[/quote]

She had multiple embryos implanted. Most people don’t.

It is certainly possible to create one and implant one.[/quote]

Except that each harvest is 25K.

Most people can’t afford to pay that much for each try. There’s also the time and physical toll that each harvest takes on the woman’s body. Most people want to extract as many eggs as possible during each try so they have the best shot of a viable embryo. Sometimes only one or two embryos are normal sometimes it’s eight or ten.

[/quote]

But you can extract 25 and only fertilize 1.

I can’t buy just one egg. I have to buy a dozen. But if I am going to eat just 1 or 2 eggs, I don’t cook all 12 and throw 10-11 away.[/quote]

Spoken as someone who has absolutely no idea how this actually works. I find that the people with the strongest opinions on the stuff don’t actually understand the facts.

If you have a dozen eggs, depending on the woman’s age anywhere between 20-80% of them are  even capable of being fertilized.  Say 8 fertilize. Then they still need to develop. You might end up with two that look great, three that arrest entirely, and three that are kind of mediocre. You’re now down to five. It makes sense to try a single embryo transfer if you are young and have high-quality embryos, but that’s not the case for most. Most women transfer multiple embryos, and most women give birth to singletons. You do the math.

The “problem” is that nature throws away the vast majority of eggs AND embryos. Most eggs don’t fertilize, and most fertilized eggs don’t implant. The rates of natural conception are at most 25% per cycle, and for some women the rate is much much lower.  Waste is just part of how the system works.

And when you’re doing IVF you have one shot to get this right, so unless you have a staggering amount of money and a staggering tolerance for pain, fertilizing one at a time is foolish.[/quote]
+1  I attempted 4 IVF cycles. One had to be canceled after many injections and ultrasounds but before egg retrieval because I had one dominant follicle maturing at a faster rate than all the others and the odds of succes were too low to justify going forward. During the course of the 3 cycles I completed, we ended up with 17 embryos. Ten of these embryos were not close enough to being viable that we could even transfer or freeze them; their growth just arrested right away in the petri  dish. Two were transferred on day 3 of my first cycle, which did not result in pregnancy. Another 2 were transferred on day 3 of my second cycle, which resulted in a chemical pregnancy. By my 3rd cycle, my RE suggested transferring 3 embryos since the odds of success were so low.That was also a day 3 transfer because our embryos tended to arrest by day 5. Miraculously, that transfer resulted in my now 12 year old fraternal twins. We created 17 embryos, of which only 2 were viable. We never had anything to freeze. We could only cycle that many times because our insurance had unusually generous IVF coverage. We never took any action to terminate a single life, but we had to create 17 “lives” (if you count a 2-7 cell embryo that isn’t capable of developing further as a life) in order to have 2 children who survived long enough to be visible via ultrasound at 7 weeks gestation. That experience solidified my opinion that “life” is more complicated than egg-meets-sperm.[/quote]

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