Using Fertility Treatments as a Solution to Infertility Making big choices in life can be difficult, especially if that big choice is having children. There are many men and women who are infertile that still want to have children. Most decide to adopt other children who do not have families or their families do not want them. But when adoption is not an option, there is now a way where those men and women can have their own children together through fertility treatments. Fertility treatments could be a good thing:being able to freeze egg and sperm, they can help infertile couples, and avoiding transmitted diseases would be easier.
Egg Freezing The more popular and developing method of treatment is egg freezing. During this procedure they take an embryo and freeze it for a month before they place it in a uterus to be later fertilized (Maher). This method was first used for cancer patients. Cancer treatments, like chemotherapy, can damage the ovaries and make it almost impossible for chemo patients to reproduce. Doctors do this procedure by taking an ovary, from the patient before they start their cancer treatments, and slicing it into strips before they freeze it (Though Experimental, Ovarian Tissue Transplants Can Help Some Women Have Children)(see figure 1).
Dr. Claus Yding Andersen, an ovarian
…show more content…
Embryonic tissue that was removed is first tested for genetic abnormalities. This is done so that the healthiest embryos are frozen and implanted. Dr. Timothy Yeko, a medical director of the assisted reproductive technology program at the Reproductive Medicine Group in Tampa, talked about the genetic testing, “ Most of our patients now choose to have this genetic testing, which has come into widespread use in the past year or so. By doing this , the miscarriage rate has dropped by 50 percent because the genetically abnormal embryos are the ones that end in miscarriage.”
First, the number of embryos placed in a woman’s uterus during any one treatment cycle can be limited, with the other embryos preserved for later use, thereby reducing the risk of a multiple pregnancy. Second, embryos preserved from an initial attempt at IVF and replaced later if necessary can help to avoid repeated surgery to secure more eggs. Third, cryopreservation could enhance efforts to detect the presence of infectious diseases and genetic anomalies by providing ample time for proper screening and analysis. This advantage not only has implications for the health of any progeny, but it could also reduce the incidence and associated risks of abortions if abnormalities are discovered at a later point in the pregnancy. Fourth, by preserving embryos that would otherwise be discarded and allowing them to be brought to term at a later date, freezing can lead to offspring who would not otherwise have been born. And fifth, when combined with analysis, freezing will increase the possibility that normal embryos will be frozen for future use in implatation as well as research (Woods, 1988).
CBS News estimates that there are approximately 12 million infertile americans, but according to scientists, cloning may very likely become the next big solution to infertility. The type is referred to as reproductive cloning and is a term used to describe the process of making an identical copy of a person, creating a new human being with the same DNA as an existing person. So far it has not been allowed in humans, but it has been used experimentally with many animals, and the first successful case, as aforementioned, was of Dolly the sheep back in 1996. However, Couples who cannot conceive naturally turn to fertility treatments and other procedures for help. Some couples who can produce eggs and sperm are able to conceive this way. However, reproductive cloning can provide another option for those who want children but cannot produce eggs or sperm. The process of reproductive cloning can create a genetically related child for the couple. The child produced by cloning would be the genetic duplicate of one of the parents. Through this process, a cell is taken form the patient, the nucleus is removed and is put into an empty egg. Then the formed an embryyo is implanted into a woman’s uterus, and it will then grow like any normal pregnancy. Any extra embryos could also be immediately frozen for future attempts at pregnancy. Dr. Mark Sauer, an infertility expert at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, hopes
Our Dallas fertility center is a proud supporter of the LGBT community, and we offer many gay fertility options to help patients become parents.
Despite getting a fair amount of publicity in the news current treatments for infertility, in terms of percentages, are not very successful. One estimate is that current infertility treatments are less than 10 percent successful. Couples go through physically and emotionally painful procedures for a small chance of having
For lesbian couples, one partner can choose to donate their egg and the other will carry the embryo. Gay couples and single men can start their families with the mix of donor eggs, their sperm, and a surrogate mother to carry the embryo. With the use of IVF,, the embryo is then implanted into the gestational surrogate. Embryos can also be cryogenically frozen by using frozen embryo technology, or FET, for future possibilities. Couples can choose to have more children when ready, but when parents choose not to, or are unable to, have more, frozen embryos that are not used by the couple have many more options than being thawed and thrown away. The top option picked is to donate the unused embryos to couples that cannot have children. The next highest option is to donate the embryos to a research facility to be used for science. Stem Cell research also allows for the possible cure for many diseases and, although very controversial, will be very helpful in the future, but does unfortunately use embryos. But the donation of embryos to the facilities will be of total consent of the parents and will not waste unused
Infertility is the fundamental lacking of the ability to conceive a baby, and both men and women can have this problem. Dr. Clark, our guest speaker in class pointed out that approximately 30% of men and women are infertile, while 25% of infertility cannot be explain by science yet. Because of that, infertility is no longer considered as a lifestyle problem but a disease instead. According to Dr. Clark, one of the options for the infertility patients today is the use of stem cell therapies to treat infertility, and one of the recent popular stem cell therapies is reproductive cloning. Reproduction cloning is a process to “produce” a next generation of “you” through somatic cell nuclear transfer. In my paper, I will argue that
As stated by Dr Grossman of Xavier University “In the United States, infertility is an issue of great concern to many couples of childbearing age. More than 15 percent of all such couples are estimated to be infertile (Grossman, 2003). The medical definition of in vitro fertilization: IVF is a laboratory procedure in which sperm are placed with an unfertilized egg in a Petri dish to achieve fertilization. The embryo is then transferred into the uterus to begin a pregnancy or cryopreserved (frozen) for future use.(retrieved on June 12, 2011, from www.medterms.com) IVF was originally devised to permit women with damaged or absent Fallopian tubes to have a baby. Normally a mature egg is released from the ovary
Ovation Fertility is proud of our Nashville genetics lab, which offers our patients PGD using FISH and CCS under the director of Amy Jones, MS.
IVF is a way to raise the chance for that number of live births to grow in women over forty-three, they Advanced Fertility Center of Chicago also shows that In-vitro was an option for women up until the age of fifty. A woman’s physical disability can lead her to an impaired ability to have children, leaving them to suffer or spend money on an infertility treatment.
Adoption benefits infertile couples. Infertile couples believe that adopting will help them grow both as individuals and as a couple (Daniluk and Hurtig-Mitchell 394). “Participants also talked about being "older and wiser," about how much more solid their marriage is…” (Daniluk and Hurtig-Mitchell 396). Having a child is a big responsibility and it is important for couples to agree on how they raise the child and as individuals, it helps them have their own bonds with the child themselves. Infertile couples with not have to deal with heartache of not being able to conceive (464). Conceiving through IVF takes a long time and takes a great deal of money, so getting a negative instead of a positive
Infertility is widespread: about 7% of married couples in the United States are unable to conceive after 12 months of unprotected intercourse (Purdy, 2001, Bioethics of New Assisted Reproduction). In Vitro Fertilization is used when a women has irreparably damaged fallopian
It is assumed by most that we will all be able to grow up, fall in love, get married, and then have children of our own. This is not the lifestyle that all people choose, but it is still the view accepted by the majority of society. What happens when the unthinkable occurs and a happily married couple is unable to get pregnant? This is a reality for 7.1%, or 2.8 million, of the married couples in the United States (Lenox, 1999). Today, there are many people all over the world that decide to use fertility treatments to help them conceive a child, and this often leads to the birth of twins, triplets, or even higher order multiples. There are many risk factors that are involved in this type of
Human reproduction is as ancient a topic as any on the plant, and has been around since time began. Childlessness has plagued mankind for years, it has risen from 1 in 10 (1970) couples were childless to 1 in 5 (2010) as reported by the Pew Research Center. Adoption was once the only answer for a childless couple but with methods such as artificial insemination and other fertility treatments, which the scientific community has developed a couple now has more options to choose from. Artificial insemination was first used in 1884, and impregnating a woman through what is known as artificial insemination, was first used in 1884 (The Medical World: 163–164). Fertility treatments continued to be developed. In 1906 Surgeon Robert Tuttle Morris witnessed the only successful ovarian transplantation from healthy women to infertile women. In vitro fertilization (IVF) produced the world’s first test tube baby born on July 25, 1978 (The Medical World:, pg. 223). This procedure is done by removing the egg(s) from a woman and placing them with sperm and a fluid medium to fertilize in a laboratory 2-6 days then transferred to a woman’s uterus to establish a successful pregnancy. In 2010, the physiologist, Robert G. Edwards, who developed the IVF treatment, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Concerns about the possibility of women being used as "baby factories" was raised by Pope John Paul but He also refused to condemn the parents of the child (Prospettive nel
A woman battling Crohn’s disease had “frozen embryos created with her eggs and a friend 's sperm [which] were implanted in a surrogate” because she did not want to risk carrying a child (Cohen, 2013). Carrying a child could have negatively affected her and the child’s health if she were to become pregnant and could have proven to be fatal. This process can be used for men who have cancer and want to have children in the future, whether it is by themselves or with a partner. This is the only way for couples to have biological children of their own, especially for couples where one partner is sick and could possibly be infertile.
Two techniques have been used to preserve the fertility in female patients; they are oocyte cryopreservation and ovarian tissue cryopreservation. Oocyte cryopreservation is where a harvested egg is extracted, frozen and then preserved (Imbert et al, 2014, p. 1938). In adolescent cancer patients, the required harvested egg can be a problem, for the earnestness to start cancer treatment. The oocytes are harvested by inserting a needle into the ovarian cortex and as a result of this; the process is very painful and will require sedation (Knight et al., 2015, p.2). Pre-pubertal females who have not ovulated do not have the option of OC (Knight et al., 2015, p.2). Ovarian tissue cryopreservation is the process of taking the outer layer of the ovary and then sliced into strips and frozen (Knight et al., 2015, p.3). This is a more favoured option