Women's Health

Since the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, in vitro fertilization has produced more than 300 babies around the world, and the number grows daily as new clinics open. Louise has an IVF sister, Natalie Jean, born in 1982. But the success rate of in vitro fertilization is less than 20 percent. To increase the possibility of a “take,” doctors use fertility drugs, fertilize several eggs, and then reimplant all of them. This approach also ups the chances of a multiple birth, as Todd and Nancy Tilton of Sea Cliff, New York, discovered. Mrs. Tilton underwent in vitro fertilization at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk and gave birth to IVF twins.

In vitro fertilization can cost up to 15,000 dollars before a pregnancy is achieved, and it may be useful to fewer than 5 percent of infertile women. Nevertheless, the success of IVF has inspired doctors to pursue even bolder, more remarkable solutions to infertility.
One such answer is embryo transfer. In 1983, Australian scientists announced the birth of an IVF baby (that is, fertilization took place outside the body in a glass dish) from an egg donated by one woman to an infertile wife.

More remarkable still, Dr. John Buster and his colleagues at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, delivered to one mother a baby who started life inside the womb of another woman. Doctors inseminated the husband’s sperm into the other woman. Five days after the fertilization, a doctor transferred the growing fetus out of the donor’s uterus and implanted it into the wife.
“The donors love it,” Dr. Buster says. “They feel it is a big thing to give the gift of life to another person.”

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WOMEN’S HEALTH