Today, infertile couples have a wide range of treatment options. Many factors will affect your decisions in pursuing infertility treatment.
Be sure to consider time commitment, costs, insurance coverage, job and career goals, religious beliefs, cooperation between partners,
medical diagnosis, emotional energy, and your current situation.
After a diagnosis of infertility, the couple and their physician jointly decide upon the best treatment plan based on their specific situation.
The majority of couples with infertility can be helped through conventional infertility treatments.
Following the diagnosis of infertility, physicians usually first consider hormonal therapy and surgical procedures, sometimes enhanced by intrauterine insemination (IUI).
These can be less intrusive and less expensive than ART procedures.
The more advanced fertility procedures that involve removing eggs from the female partner or a donor are collectively known as assisted reproductive technologies (ART).
These procedures give physicians the ability to bypass or correct some obstacles in the natural reproductive cycle. ART is often used after hormonal therapy alone fails.
After a thorough workup, the practitioner suggests a treatment that best suits the couple's specific situation, either IVF or one of the other ART procedures available today.
Most ART procedures involve a common set of steps that are based on in vitro fertilization (IVF), the artificial insemination process used for the first "test tube baby." In IVF, the
doctor uses hormonal medications to stimulate the ovaries, gathers the eggs, fertilizes the eggs in vitro (outside the body), then transfers the resulting embryos through the cervix into the uterus.
Male factor infertility may benefit from microfertilization processes, such as ICSI, which uses one sperm to fertilize an egg.
Female factor infertility may benefit from egg donation, which allows the woman to experience pregnancy and childbirth. It also allows the man to be the biological father to his child.