Meet the couples traveling halfway around the world for cheaper IVF — no matter the risks

Shannon Buck was starting to feel hopeless.

For four years, she’d been trying to have a baby with husband Ryan — but natural conception, which seemed to come so easily to everyone around them, and sometimes even accidentally, just wasn’t happening for the would-be parents. 

So, in April 2024, the Austin, Texas, couple boarded a packed flight to Istanbul — joining men traveling to Turkey for cheap hair transplants and women chasing bigger breasts at smaller prices — embarking on a nearly 6,500-mile and weeks-long journey to undergo in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. 

“IVF in America is just so expensive,” Shannon, 35, a health insurance agent, told The Post. 

“I researched how much cheaper it is in Turkey,” she said. “I found myself making a slideshow presentation for Ryan titled, ‘Reasons we need to go to Turkey for IVF.’”

At the top of her list? The $4,000 cost of the procedure at the Bahceci Fertility Clinic, ranked one of the top IVF clinics in the world by Newsweek — and certainly one of the more affordable, considering the average price of $25,000 per cycle in the United States.