Ian McGoldrick
April 18, 2006
TODAY in Queensland, scores of couples will be told they are infertile and their best hope for having a family is IVF.
Even though many will already know there is a problem, having tried unsuccessfully to fall pregnant for months or even years, the news will come as a crushing blow.
Since the first "test tube baby" created headlines around the world in 1978, IVF has become a household acronym.
But unlike the couples entering the world of IVF today, and the thousands who have gone before them, most people will not fully understand the raw reality that lies behind those three letters – the emotions laid raw, midnight injections and an emotional roller-coaster of joy and despair. After all, falling pregnant is meant to be the easiest, most natural thing in the world. Now they have been advised their best chance is a clinical procedure that will have huge emotional, physical and financial side-effects.
An ever-increasing number of couples are signing up for IVF – and it's not just the result of older career women playing catch-up.
About 15 per cent of Australian couples of reproductive age fall into the definition of infertility – that is not having fallen pregnant after 12 months of regular, unprotected sex.
National support and lobby group Access says infertility is not just a female issue. In about 40 per cent of infertile couples, the problem is a male factor, in about 40 per cent it is a female one, and for the remaining 20 per cent it is a joint problem or the cause is unknown.
It is commonly known that in vitro fertilisation means fertilisation of a woman's egg by the sperm takes place in an incubator outside the body.
But that is only one small part of the process.
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