Every week, we field questions about using sperm donors from patients who can’t have a child unless they can use donor sperm and most buy sperm from a commercial sperm bank. They may be a married couple in which the man does not produce sperm or had a vasectomy that he doesn’t want to reverse [...]

Newsweek’s cover this week had an adorable baby with the headline, “You got your sperm where? How to get pregnant, fast, cheap -and in public“. Wow, talk about an eye grabber. In this article you meet a 40 year old virgin who calls himself a “donorsexual” and gives his sperm away (in a cup) to [...]

Washington state is considering a new bill that would make paying a gestational surrogate legal. Currently, surrogates in Washington could be compensated for expenses, but payment for gestational services is illegal. States vary widely in their legal perception of surrogacy. You can find a state by state description on the All about Surrogacy.com website. Many [...]

The Chicago Tribune published this story about a 61 year old woman who gave birth to her own grandson. Unconventional certainly, but clearly an act of love by a mother that allowed her daughter and son-in-law to have a biological child- her first grandchild. Her daughter and son-in-law had tried IVF for many years and [...]

The British Medical Journal published an article (27 January 2011) which shines a light on a rare and largely avoidable complication from IVF, namely death. Although extremely rare, the European study found more maternal deaths occurred in 100,000 IVF pregnancies (42) compared to non-IVF pregnancies (6). The causes of these IVF-related death were related to [...]

Happy New Year! I hope this new year is a year of resolution of infertility for each and every one of you who are suffering from infertility. As difficult as it is, infertility is not a permanent condition, but a life passage. Everyone with infertility moves on to parenting by some means or adapts to [...]

I touched on the topic of medical tourism in a previous post, Affordable IVF?, in which I talked about “IVF Vacations” and patients seeking IVF outside the US because it was less expensive.  But this practice has expanded considerably for patients who need donor eggs or sperm or the services of a gestational surrogate to [...]

I came across the article, Military Wives Turn to Surrogacy: Labor of Love or Financial Boost? and it annoyed me. I realize that the title and the article are meant to be provocative and this one is just a revival of an old story for a slow news cycle. There have also been other almost [...]

IVF made big news again this week when numerous news outlets picked up the Fertility and Sterility journal article published September 30, 2010, reporting a live birth in May from a cryopreserved embryo that had been frozen nearly two decades ago. The embryo was stored for 19 years and 7 months. The earliest record for [...]

Third party reproduction is an umbrella term that covers using donated sperm, egg, or embryo or  “loaner” uterus to conceive and take home a baby. This option is rarely a first choice and is often the last resort before adoption or deciding to go on without children. As with much of reproductive biology, third party [...]