What an IVF doctor who’s undergone the process wants you to understand
CNN
In vitro fertilization, or IVF, is one of the last bastions of hope for couples unable to conceive on their own.
Editor’s note: This special episode of “Chasing Life: Paging Dr. Gupta” is about In vitro fertilization (IVF) and what you need to know about the Alabama ruling. We’ll return next week to the “Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta” podcast series on weight loss to explore whether menopause causes weight gain. You can listen to other episodes, about weight and health, here. (CNN) — In vitro fertilization, or IVF, is one of the last bastions of hope for couples unable to conceive on their own. “IVF is really common. Infertility affects 1 in 6 people in the United States, and annually in the US alone, we perform about 400,000 cycles of in vitro fertilization,” fertility expert Dr. Eve Feinberg, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on his podcast recently. “If you look collectively at the population of the US just over time, in the 40 years since Louise Brown was born, about 2% of the current population has been conceived with IVF,” she said of the first “test tube baby,” who was born in 1978. But for people experiencing infertility, hope is one hill on the rollercoaster. Undergoing in vitro fertilization is extremely challenging — it is often a long, physically demanding and financially draining undertaking — and there is no guarantee of a baby at the end. Feinberg knows this all too well. She has gone through the process multiple times.
