So unless you have been out of town, say Mars, you probably heard that actress Kelly Preston announced she is pregnant at 47.  CNN published the story and interviewed several celebrity REs who explained that it is possible to get pregnant even at advanced maternal age but usually not with your own eggs.  According to [...]

One of my sisters sent me a link to this NY Times article about three women who got pregnant on their own, just as they were on the brink of using Donor 8282′s sperm which they passed around among the three of them like some weird sperm chain letter. As I read the article, it [...]

The medical field of assisted reproduction is often referred to as the Wild Wild West of medicine. Not exactly. On the other hand, you might expect that the US strictly regulates ART labs and ART medicine. Not exactly. Imagine instead a patchwork of oversight which is a combination of federal law, state medical licensing, lab [...]

Sometime during your embryo’s time in the lab, your embryos will get their very first report card. Seems like too much performance pressure already, doesn’t it? Pretty soon, elite preschools will probably be asking applicants for embryo reports. Depending on the program, you might get an embryology report on day 2 , day 3 or [...]

Everybody knows someone who has been diagnosed with cancer. The good news is that survival rates are getting better and better. But greater survivorship has shone a light on problems associated with chemotherapies and radiation treatments used to treat cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy can permanently sterilize cancer patients. Why am I telling you about [...]

My Dad is retired and loves the internet. He often sends me articles he likes from the New York Times and other news outlets. This morning he sent me the story of Shannon Morell, an infertility patient who just published her book “Misconception” about her family’s horrible experience with a fertility lab error. Her frozen [...]

Facing infertility can be challenging, forcing couples to take a crash course in the medical aspects of treating infertility and emotional challenges that infertility creates. Infertility diagnosis and treatment leave many couples emotionally drained and needing encouragement and support. Sometimes the support of friends and family is not enough. Face-to-face and virtual support groups exist [...]

Because many patients do not have insurance coverage for IVF procedures, various forms of creative financing have popped up to fill the gap. Some patients have enrolled in Shared Risk Programs which are a sort of financial insurance policy against IVF failure. It works like this. The IVF program charges you a much higher initial fee [...]

In spite of research findings that dealing with infertility can be as emotionally difficult as dealing with cancer, most insurance companies do not cover infertility treatments and often view fertility procedures in the same category as medically unnecessary cosmetic enhancements like liposuction, face lifts etc. Only 15 states mandate that insurance companies in their state [...]

The first week of your new embryo’s life is a busy one.  By day two in the lab, your embryo has already established itself as a unique genetic organism and the original zygote has divided into at least two cells, starting down the road to the billions of cells your newborn will have. On day [...]