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Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

It's not enough for IVF be safe, lawful, and free. For the general, not-infertile public to actually prefer IVF over the natural way of doing things, it'd also have to be easy, convenient, and painless, and it'd have to consistently produce a baby.

Right now, anyway, IVF is anything but.

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I often hear people talking about IVF as if it's some sort of a luxury service that anyone who can afford will choose voluntarily. Clearly anyone who thinks like that hasn't actually had to go through it themselves. The physical and emotional toll is quite high. The path to conception can take many months, often years. Hormone therapy is not pleasant at all. And waiting in uncertainty for months could be quite trying for many people.

Now, it is true that IVF is currently being used when everything else has failed, so it's possible that it would be much less painful for perfectly healthy mothers/couples, especially if the technology improves a lot in the future. My advice: don't count on IVF as a family planning tool.

The only reason IVF isn't always successful is goverment regulations or medical issues. In a healthy mother we can expect a 15% success rate for each embryo, so you can just implant a bunch and remove the extras. Unfortunately, regulations, in particularly in the EU, limit you to a few at a time and I'm not aware of any human fertility specialists that will remove excess embryos. It is a numbers game that could easily be won with a change of attitude.

My wife has endometriosis [1]. IVF didn't take until our 3rd cycle (using at least 3 embryos each time).

Also, we were given the option every cycle to selectively reduce [2] embryos if too many took (luckily, that was never necessary). This was in the US.

/u/gyardley mentions that its not easy, convenient, and painless. The most expensive procedure in IVF is where you stimulate a woman's ovaries in order for them to overproduce eggs for ultrasound-guided retrieval (using an extremely long, large bore needle); as soon as medical science is close enough to converting stem cells filtered out of blood into reproductive tissue (and we're extremely close, believe me; I have done my homework), IVF will be an outpatient procedure no more expensive than an expensive dental appointment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endometriosis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_reduction

As a full disclosure my percentage comes from my research on bovine embryos. But I think viability percentage approximately matches your experience, especially when you consider that I'm used to working with ostensibly healthy individuals who could conceive naturally.

If they had dumped 10 embryos each cycle the story would have been different.

Thanks for whatever research you did/do. Science moves forward one discovery at a time.

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