In Vitro Fertilization
Today, thanks to the miracle of science, thousands of couples desperately wanting children, who can't conceive naturally, are able to become parents.
"In the in vitro fertilization process women are given hormonal treatments to try to stimulate their ovaries to release eggs, and then we remove those eggs fertilize them outside the body in a laboratory with sperm and place the embryos back into the uterine cavity," says Dr. Daniel Stein of St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital.
But, one of the greatest challenges with IVF is multiple births.
"We often have to replace more than one embryo back into the uterus, about a third of pregnancies from in vitro fertilization are multiple pregnancies, the majority of those are twin pregnancies, but there is also an increased rate of triplet and quadruple pregnancy rate, we want to try to reduce the multiple pregnancy rate because there are so many problems associated with multiple pregnancy, like cerebral palsy, other types of neurological damage, increase c-section rates for the mom," says Dr. Stein. (Read more about In Vitro Fertilization)
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