Building a family and parenting, being fundamental part of life, sometimes don’t come easy.
Unfortunately infertility still remains a huge problem for our society. According to World Health Organization about 50-80 million women in the world suffer from infertility problems. Despite of substantial progress in fertility treatment, no tendency towards reduction of infertility rates is evidenced nowadays, and it appears almost every sixth couple is unable to conceive for one or another reason.
Still, when everything fails to get pregnant and infertility has been diagnosed, there is no reason to fall in despair, since there are numerous options available through Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART):
— IVF (IN VITRO FERTILIZATION) is one of the most commonly used procedures, in course of which a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm are joined in a laboratory outside a woman’s body. In effect, 3 to 5 embryos are developed and placed in woman’s uterus.
– ICSI (INTRACYTOPLASMIC SPERM INJECTION): If there is a question of the sperm’s ability to fertilize the egg, that poses no problem whatsoever. ICSI would be performed instead of usual IVF, which means that the eggs and the sperm are then fertilized in the laboratory by direct injection of a single sperm into each egg. Three days later the resulting embryos are simply placed into a woman’s uterus with a microscopic needle, rather than many sperm positioned close to the outside of the egg, as in IVF.
— In course of GIFT (GAMETE INTRAFALLOPIAN TRANSFER) woman’s eggs are combined with a man’s sperm in a laboratory and surgically injected into her fallopian tubes using a laparoscope. Fertilization happens inside the body, and the embryo implants naturally.
As with GIFT, ZIFT (ZYGOTE INTRAFALLOPIAN TRANSFER) involves joining of woman’s eggs and man’s sperm in a laboratory. But the doctor will wait until fertilization occurs to place embryos inside of a woman’s uterus.
Although these procedures were once commonly practiced, they are rarely used today because the success with IVF is far greater on average.
— If a woman is unable to conceive, gestate and deliver a child herself, using a gestational carrier may be the sole and the best choice to produce an embryo that is biologically related to the couple. This method is namely known as GESTATIONAL SURROGACY. The embryo is conceived as a result of standard IVF-program and is placed in the uterus of a surrogate mother, who will carry the baby to term. When the child is born, the surrogate mother will relinquish custody of a child to biological parents. Should it be impossible to produce an embryo using gametal cells of both partners because of the nature of their fertility problem, a couple can use donated eggs/sperm.
All these methods and techniques are successfully applied in the accredited Ukrainian clinics, specialising in the field of ART, in compliance with high world standards. At the same time Ukrainian medical practitioners focus their activities on pregnancy follow-up after IVF in order to ensure normal course of gestation and birth of a healthy child.