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My wife and I have a beautiful daughter about to turn 2. But she wouldn't have existed if it weren't for IVF (in vitro fertilization). Had to stab her stomach w

• Auracle 4y ago
  As an addendum, for us IUI (intrauterine insemination) was a complete waste of money. My sperm counts were largely fine and it might make sense if you believe it’s your primary issue - for unexplained infertility I don’t believe it makes sense.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • mcv 4y ago
    We tried IUI to conceive our second child, and after a couple of months of trying, my wife got tired of it, we stopped temporarily, and just then she got pregnant. No idea if IUI helped or not, but we got a great kid out of it.
• bushbaba 4y ago
  Accept for most in the world IVF is a years salary.
  • scient 4y ago
    Thats absolutely not true.
    • Vikerchu 4y ago
      Idk ive seen real expensive IVFs
    • devmor 4y ago
      You're right, it's not true. It's more like a decade's salary. Full IVF generally ranges from $10-15k USD. Median worldwide income is about $900 USD.
      • miroljub 4y ago
        It costs that much only in the USA, not everywhere. In many parts of the world, it's either way less expensive, or even covered by health insurance (at least a few tries).
        • dagw 4y ago
          It costs that much only in the USA Costs a good $10k in Sweden and Denmark as well. Don't know about the rest of Europe.
          • Aeolun 4y ago
            Japan was $4k or so, but we had to pay only like $200 per attempt if it didn’t succeed.
        • vinay427 4y ago
          It is similarly expensive in various other countries where it isn't always covered, and meanwhile is also covered in some states in the US. https://resolve.org/learn/financial-resources-for-family-building/insurance-coverage/insurance-coverage-by-state/ https://resolve.org/learn/financial-resources-for-family-bui...
      • 4y ago
• e40 4y ago
  What did it cost? My understanding is that it is not cheap.
  • ne0flex 4y ago
    If you're in the US, it's possible it can be covered by insurance. My wife and I are in the process of doing IVF. Though it can be very expensive - the injection medications cost a total of $16K. Thankfully, it's covered by my health insurance and I had a $100 co-pay. PGTA screening is not covered by my insurance and to my knowledge costs about $1k. Other parts in the IVF process vary in cost but most is covered by my insurance with a $45 co-pay.
  • metalliqaz 4y ago
    Around $20k out of pocket for IVF with ICSI when I did it. Most of that (~12k) was the drugs.
• xienze 4y ago
  > and my wife was 38 at the time of conception. This sounds obvious, but apparently isn’t to a lot of younger people. 38 is considered quite old to start having children (yes it happens, but it’s called a “geriatric pregnancy” for a reason), and I’m sure it contributed to the difficulties conceiving. A lot of young folks have been convinced that child birth can be put off more or less indefinitely while you pursue a career, but the longer you wait, the more difficult it becomes. Just another piece in the “gee, why are birth rates declining?” puzzle.
  • bpbp-mango 4y ago
    I'm not sure why you're being downvoted for this, perhaps it's an uncomfortable truth.
  • Eleison23 4y ago
    • dang 4y ago
      Please stop posting flamewar comments and ideological battle comments to HN. You've unfortunately done quite a lot of that. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
    • LordDragonfang 4y ago
      Fertility rate is pretty much just correlated with GDP per capita until around $20k ppp, after which it levels out at just below fertility for basically the rest of the graph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
  • atemerev 4y ago
    Well here where I live, the median age for a woman giving birth is 42. The old normal is not normal anymore.
• dr-detroit 4y ago
• addingadimensio 4y ago
  It’s fine to be hesitant for IVF when you’re younger you don’t need it when you’re young
• wintermutestwin 4y ago
  A long time ago, my spouse and I moved to Massachusetts because they mandated that Insurance companies must cover IVF. I got a job at a small startup, but just as we were getting started with IVF, they got acquired by a California megacorp. I thought I'd have to quit, but it turned out that the acquiring company's insurance covered IVF. Back then, IVF Drs. were measured on their success rate so they wanted to put in three blastocysts (fertilized eggs). With fears of triplets in my head, I talked my spouse down to two. My twins are adults now and totally awesome :~)
• bdcravens 4y ago
  I have a medical condition where I have no vas deferens. Sadly, IVF didn't work. I don't say that to ask for sympathy, but to say that my wife went through the same series of needles, etc, without the payoff at the end. (Additionally I had to have a surgery to remove sperm from the testes, which was painful to recover from as you might imagine.) Anyone who embarks on the financial and emotional cost of IVF needs to be fully aware of the possibility that it won't work.
  • greeneggs 4y ago
    Note that the CDC collects statistics on assisted reproductive technology success rates. Here is the 2019 report: https://www.cdc.gov/art/reports/2019/pdf/2019-Report-ART-Fertility-Clinic-National-Summary-h.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/art/reports/2019/pdf/2019-Report-ART-Fer... . See especially Figure 3 on page 29 (Percentage of embryo transfers that resulted in live-birth delivery, by patient age and egg or embryo source). There is more data, including from individual clinics, at https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html .
• sidewndr46 4y ago
  I don't think that is how IVF works, you can't induce an adult female to produce eggs in any medically approved way. Apparently mammals are born with a finite number of eggs that just get used up as they get older.
  • zrail 4y ago
    OP was probably using "produce" to mean "ovulate", i.e. cause an egg to leave an ovary.
  • samtho 4y ago
    Hormones are injected into the egg-having partner to induce a mass release of eggs. Ova are not created in this process.
    • bdowling 4y ago
      • mrguyorama 4y ago
        • Izkata 4y ago
          "egg-having partner" is an extreme far left term that tries to work around the hole they dug for themselves involving transgender ideology, that the vast vast majority of the world does not care for. The non-political term is women or wife or female or anything else along those lines.
          • PakG1 4y ago
            I honestly don't care what words people use though, as long as I can understand the words? Egg-having partner would fit that description to a pedantic degree.
          • 4y ago
• thehappypm 4y ago
  Another lesson from your story (similar to many of my friends’) is to just have kids younger. It sounds like you started at around 35 — if people started at 30, even, fertility is higher.
  • abyssin 4y ago
    I agree. We shouldn’t pressure people to make children early, but make sure they understand the consequences of delaying. I’m surrounded by couples of 30-35 year old that are struggling to have children. They had no idea it would be so hard.
    • spaceman_2020 4y ago
      I’m 35, wife is 34. We’ve had no problems conceiving but it hasn’t been smooth sailing post conception at all. Had one molar pregnancy, one missed miscarriage of a Mono/Di twin, and we’re now onto our third term. Although these issues can prop up at any age, the statistical chance of something going wrong keeps going up. Moreover, there’s the constant fear with every miscarriage that we’re getting even older and even more likely to run into bigger problems. I’m honestly surprised by how little people talk about these issues.
  • fhd2 4y ago
    I started at 24 - certainly regret nothing, but I also can't say it was the smoothest path :D Trying to provide and care while being new to the job market was quite a ride. There's been some changes to make having kids less of a challenge in recent years - at least in Europe. But it still seems like there's a long way to go, especially in terms of corporate cultures that, in my experience, don't really know what to do with young parents.
    • Aeolun 4y ago
      > corporate cultures that, in my experience, don't really know what to do with young parents What do they not know? I’ve been mostly treated fairly (not exactly a young parent though).
• sircastor 4y ago
  We did IVF and have a wonderful little boy. Would do it again to have our kid, but my goodness, the expense was overwhelming. We had to go into a non-trivial amount of debt to do IVF and I don’t know how anyone makes it work (short of what we did) we tried for 8 years to conceive naturally. Tangentially, we spent some time looking at adoption and the total cost going through an agency I think would’ve been about the same.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    Adoption is crazy expensive, and a super hard process compared to, you know, just popping one out yourself. I sort of understand why, but I still think it’s a bit counterproductive.
    • sircastor 4y ago
      Yes. Adoption is in this strange place of being something that everyone understands the pitfalls of government regulation (custody of a human) but by necessity it must be regulated. Services have filled the space by charging for everything and they have a captive market that has no other choice. The problem is exasperated by the presence of potential adopters who have biases related to age or race of children.
• ridgered4 4y ago
  We had some fertility issues as well and while IUI and time worked for the two children we have IVF was looked into. Before the whole thing I didn't understand why people didn't just adopt. But once looking into the sky high costs and uncertainty of adoption I understood why IVF is popular. It is expensive and uncertain as well, but much less so.
  • PakG1 4y ago
    Adopting is hard. I've tried to convince my wife that we should adopt because I've always wanted to adopt anyway, but she's scared I'm not taking it seriously enough. She says with adoption, you need to emotionally commit more than you would with your own blood because the natural instinct isn't there. She's scared I can't handle the responsibility and she might be scared of it too. She said we can have the talk again after I prove I can be a good dad with our own blood first. She doesn't want to be the mom that loves and handles everything while the dad doesn't care.
    • Aeolun 4y ago
      I’m always surprised that they think they’re the only ones that care. Just because it doesn’t show in the same way doesn’t mean I don’t care. My wife’s care consists of endlessly fuzzing over every little detail of their appearance when going out. Mine consists of ensuring he’s happy and fed. Personally my issue with adoption is that I do not want to be in a position where I treat my own child and the adopted one differently. Don’t know if it’d happen, but I don’t want to try.
      • IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
        "They"?
        • Aeolun 4y ago
          Potentially the reverse is true.
      • PakG1 4y ago
• jrvarela56 4y ago
  Glad it worked out! My daughter is 8mo now and we had concerns going into the 'getting pregnant' phase. If you can't afford IVF or want to do it another way, there are things you can try to do before you start trying to avoid surprises - the main goal is to try to assess your status so you can align expecatations. It's frustrating to 'get started' and think 'it should take about X months' and then not seeing it happen (huh sounds familiar to product work?). First, we always think it's the women's fault (or at least society defaults to that nowadays for sure). Men can go to a lab and get your sperm tested and check your testosterone levels. There are actionables to improve this in >6 months (not sure if less). My wife did all sorts of stuff: checked hormone levels, managed her endo with excercise/diet/stress-management, got her period into one of those tracking apps to the point it actually predicted when ovulation happened (corroborated with home test kits). In summary, I'm not trying to deal out a recipe here - just making a point that having a lower-stress attempt at getting pregnant can take a while but something can be done if you want to avoid cost of IVF or misalignment of expectations when 'trying' (we started ~preping - wife more so than me - 2 years in advance bc my wife had endo).
  • datavirtue 4y ago
    Insurance will pay for it. After getting denied a friend of our just kept writing letters until they agreed to pay it. It's a medical condition.
• bergenty 4y ago
  You may not like to hear this but women having a kid past 30 introduces a lot of potential problems and deficiencies in the child.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    It increases the chances. It doesn’t guarantee it by any measure. Only past 40 do you go into ‘really need to check’ territory.
  • Eleison23 4y ago
    That's a myth that the medical establishment wants to sell you. Women are fine and have children with no problem, long past that artificial "deadline". https://youtu.be/g9ryP0UyO5U https://youtu.be/g9ryP0UyO5U
    • spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Not 30 certainly, but once you get closer to 40, your chances of running into problems only goes up substantially. Post 35, most couples should have a serious talk about kids. There’s a healthy chance that you’ll run into some problems either conceiving or carrying the fetus. Every aborted attempt can cost you months or more - a luxury you might not have if you’re touching 40.
  • CadmiumYellow 4y ago
    Women have been having kids past 30 since the dawn of humanity. The only difference is that now women tend to be older at the time of their FIRST pregnancy. Before the modern era women would start having kids in their late teens or early 20s and continue doing so until menopause in many causes, so that's up til 45-55. Plenty of women are perfectly capable of having healthy kids past 30 and even past 40.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• UncleOxidant 4y ago
  IVF is expensive. Some friends of ours tried it but it didn't work. They were out $30K and finally just made peace with the fact that they weren't going to have kids.
• onetimeusename 4y ago
• jupp0r 4y ago
  This and go out and vote for politicians who keep IVF legal and expand protections for it.
• mattlondon 4y ago
  We were looking down the barrel of IVF after everything else didn't work but all sperm and eggs etc looked normal. Turns out that my wife had an immune response (so-called "natural killer cells") that was preventing successful pregnancy. Drugs for that were simple and very mild (and cheap!) and within 2 months we were pregnant for the first child. For the second child it was just 1 month! This was all naturally conceived after a very long period of nothing happening. IVF seemed very invasive with potentially low success rates but conversely high risk of twins etc if it did work. I'd recommend getting the immunology investigated if people are suggesting IVF for you - for us it was utterly straight forward and simple once the diagnosis was made and the drugs prescribed. Google for Dr Shehata in the UK.