Word: vitro
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...long, hard road that leads a couple to the in-vitro fertilization clinic, and the journey has been known to rock the soundest marriages. "If you want to illustrate your story on infertility, take a picture of a couple and tear it in half," says Cleveland Businessman James Popela, 36, speaking from bitter experience. "It is not just the pain and indignity of the medical tests and treatment," observes Betty Orlandino, who counsels infertile couples in Oak Park, Ill. "Infertility rips at the core of the couple's relationship; it affects sexuality, self-image and selfesteem. It stalls careers, devastates...
...Freeman, executive director of Resolve, a national infertility-counseling organization, microsurgery can restore fertility in 70% of women with minor scarring around their tubes. But for those whose tubes are completely blocked, the chance of success ranges from 20% to zero. These women are the usual candidates for in-vitro fertilization...
...happens, they were wrong. Says Gynecologist Howard Jones, who, together with his wife, Endocrinologist Georgeanna Seegar Jones, founded the first American in-vitro program at Norfolk in 1978: "It turns out that if you get the sperm to the egg quickly, most often you inhibit the process." According to Jones, the pioneers of IVF made so many wrong assumptions that "the birth of Louise Brown now seems like a fortunate coincidence...
Essential to in-vitro fertilization, of course, is retrieval of the one egg normally produced in the ovaries each month. Today in-vitro clinics help nature along by administering such drugs as Clomid and Pergonal, which can result in the development of more than one egg at a time. By using hormonal stimulants, Howard Jones "harvests" an average of 5.8 eggs per patient; it is possible to obtain as many as 17. "I felt like a pumpkin ready to burst," recalls Loretto Leyland, 33, of Melbourne, who produced eleven eggs at an Australian clinic, one of which became her daughter...
Many couples have a strong compulsion to try again immediately after in vitro fails. Popela of Cleveland compares it to a gambling addiction: "Each time you get more desperate, each time you say, 'Just one more time.' " In fact, the odds do improve with each successive try, as doctors learn more about the individual patient. But the stakes are high: in the U.S., each attempt costs between $3,000 and $5,000, not including travel costs and time away from work. Lynn Kellert, 31, and her husband Mitchell, 34, of New York City, who tried seven times at Norfolk before...