Congratulations, you’ve made it! You’ve done all the necessary preliminary testing, you’ve gone through stims and egg retrieval or the process of selecting a donor, you’ve worked your way through your pre-embryo transfer protocol calendar, and your transfer day has finally arrived.  After the procedure, you’re sent home with instructions from your provider, and a strong recommendation to avoid taking an at-home pregnancy test. Instead, you’re directed to wait until your next appointment – an hCG (Human chorionic gonadotropin) blood test – to find out if your embryo has settled in for the long haul.  Understandably,...

Big feelings abound whenever the “maybe, next month” turns into conversations with doctors and an official diagnosis you maybe weren’t expecting. While any person or couple navigating infertility is far from alone — Resolve, the National Infertility Association, shares that 1 in 8 couples struggle with getting pregnant or bringing a pregnancy to full term —  it’s true that each person’s journey with infertility is unique.  The mental health strain of navigating infertility, for instance, can present differently from couple to couple or even within the same relationship.   According to the MGH Center for Women’s Mental...

You’ve shown up for all of the appointments. You’ve endured every single at-home injection. You’ve taken your prenatal vitamins and prescribed IVF meds. Your eggs have been retrieved and fertilized, and now it’s time for the final step of the IVF process: embryo transfer.  Everything has been preparing you for this step, building up to this moment. Depending on how you and your team of doctors decide to conduct the transfer, it could happen a few days after egg retrieval, during your next menstrual cycle, or even months or years down the line.  With all of...

If you have been in the world of infertility for any amount of time, you probably feel like you need a cheat sheet to keep track of the abundance of fertility acronyms that are involved in the process: TTC, IVF, IUI, PIO, ICSI. The list is seemingly never-ending, and it can be daunting to those who are entering the already stressful world of fertility treatments. IVF, or in-vitro fertilization, is a form of assisted reproductive technology in which an egg is fertilized by sperm outside of the body. After fertilization, if a viable embryo is created,...

On the morning of July 24, 2022, I cried in my car on the way to work, and I’m certain I am not the only one. I had just stepped out of my house when I heard the news notification pop up on my phone: “BREAKING: Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade." I cried for the loss of reproductive rights, the loss of bodily autonomy, and for my teenage self who, in an abusive relationship and in the midst of a pregnancy scare, at the very least had the comfort of knowing that I had options...

Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) has been used in the United States since 1981 to help individuals and couples grow their families. During the early years of IVF, success rates were relatively low – approximately a 10-15% live birth rate per egg retrieval. To make up for this, IVF clinics routinely transferred more than one embryo to try to increase the chance of success. In fact, it was not uncommon to transfer two to four embryos at a time, especially in patients in their late 30s and 40s. Needless to say, a lot has changed since then.  ...