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 [...]

If you’ve completed your family and still have “excess” embryos in storage at your clinic, you have a choice to make. Storage indefinitely is usually not an option unless you move your embryos to a long term storage facility like ReproTech and are willing to pay for storage forever. Many patients choose to thaw and [...]

Considering the history of sperm donation in the US, it’s no surprise that we are still struggling with issues surrounding sperm donor secrecy. The first documented case of sperm donation was described in a letter written by Addison Davis Hard,  a medical student in 1884 at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia who describes probably the [...]

Having just returned from a intense two day conference on FDA regulation of sperm, egg and embryo donation, I am full of fun -or at least odd- facts about the convoluted maze of federal regulations designed to protect us from ourselves and our reproductive urges, particularly if we bring more than two to the party. [...]