Wednesday, August 19, 2009

You have got to be kidding me...

**EDIT** Someone found that apparently the woman pregnant with 12 babies was a hoax. Read about it here.

There is a woman in Tunisia pregnant with 12 babies. TWELVE BABIES!!! Here is the article. And here is my response:

This is so so so selfish. I can not believe that a doctor would allow this, but I don't know the regulations in Tunisia. She is endangering her life and the life of those babies. It isn't confirmed whether she went through IVF or ovulation induction. Ovulation induction is what I was going through with Clomid. Trying to get the ovaries to produce eggs so that you can get pregnant. There is a possibility for high order multiples, but if you are being monitored it is not likely to happen, and it is rare for it to even happen on Clomid, but still possible. All of the high order multiples you have heard about in the news have been concieved through IVF, I believe. Octomom had more eggs than what was recommended transferred into her, which was why she had 8 babies. I believe she had 6 fertilized eggs transferred and two split. The norm is 2 eggs, sometimes 3 depending on the history of the woman with fertility treatments. It is rare for pregnancies to be higher than twins with IVF, but it is possible because every egg transferred, if it lives, has the possibility to split.

Now... I'm not going to go on about why it is important to be monitored and be with a doctor with high ethical standards because I want you to read about that here. Instead I am going to talk about what this does to insurance and the public's view of fertility treatments. If the public continues to think that they will be supporting women who have high order multiples, and if they think that every IVF treatment results in multiples more than twins or triplets, then they are less likely to go along with having their company's insurance cover fertility treatments, leaving couples without fertility insurance when needing fertility treatments. Infertility is more common than what is actually known because not many people talk about it, but as long as people think that fertility treatments result in high order multiples more often, there is less of a chance for politicians to mandate insurance cover fertility treatments. The bottom line is money and if people think that they are going to have to support these children, they won't support bills to cover fertility treatments.

But think about it... if you aren't going through fertility treatments yourself, chances are you know someone who is. You just may not know they are doing them.

1 comment:

Amy G. said...

I completely agree with you. What is it a competition to see how many babies you can have at once? What is this world coming to?