Thirty Percent Success Rate
Posted by Rebecca Teti
in News
on Monday, July 25, 2011 2:00 PM
“The overall IVF success rate sits at around 30% today.”
I was astonished to read that statistic in a story about in vitro fertilization over the weekend.
Holly Finn’s moving firsthand account of her visceral longing for a child and the painful path she’s been on to have one lacks a Catholic or pro-life perspective.
You won’t read a word in it about the plight of frozen embryos, selective reduction of embryos or the rights of children to know their parents and to have both a mother and father.
Nevertheless, I learned a great deal from her experience, particularly from the things she wishes she’d understood when she was younger.
For one thing, she offers a poignant reminder that even when you’re not one of the 12% of couples suffering from infertility, life is a gift not under our control:
In any given month, with a man whose parts are in order, a healthy woman’s chance of getting pregnant naturally is 20% to 25% if she’s in her 20s, 10% to 15% in her 30s, and 5% in her 40s. Really, it’s miraculous at any age.
She’s brutally honest with us, and therefore exposes herself to our judgment about her moral choices; what was more interesting to me was not the points of conflict with Church teaching in her perspective, but her points of intersection with it, particularly her re-thinking of the wisdom of postponing family life
The first thing I’d like to tell women ages 26 to 34 is: Start having babies. I know it’s not polite or funny. But I don’t want others to go through what I’m going through now.
There’s also her innate sense that IVF is inhuman, even though she is pursuing it. Ponder the pathos in this passage, for example:
On a walk by the sea one blustery day, a friend told me he’d never hire a hooker. “It’s efficient,” he said, “but there’s something so sad about not being able to get it for free.” Picking a sperm donor feels like that, at least at first. For months before I started IVF, I sat down at my computer, logged on to a sperm bank and stood up again.
I’ve never wanted to pick a man just so I could have children. I craved something less logical. My first love was the man who drove all night in the snow to New York City. He called me from the corner of 93rd Street and Third Avenue and said nothing except, “Look out your window.” There he was, shivering at the pay phone, gorgeously spontaneous. I miss pay phones.
And I believe in soul mates. So how did I end up cruising a cryobank? Is this the punishment for romanticism: having to do the least romantic thing in the world? Like many, I trusted that marriage and children—my family—would happen. In the meantime, I lived my life. I fell in with some fascinating men, up close and unvarnished, and had conversations I can still quote. I didn’t want to settle at 25. I wanted adventures. I just didn’t imagine their cost, and how I would struggle to keep paying it.
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