Embryo donation

Just like most IVF programs around the world, ours is accumulating frozen embryos that are no longer wanted by the patients who generated them. Thus, we are starting an embryo donation program. My nurse practitioner recently published a nice review about this process. You can read it by going to this link: http://www.srm-ejournal.com/article.asp?AID=8004&UID=

MPS

From Wall Street to Suite 370E – a sad twist to the current credit crisis.

Things are a little slow at AFS this week. Sometimes bad economic news makes people have second thoughts about having kids, but we’re not worried - the urge to reproduce is hard-wired into our species, otherwise there would be some other species reading this. And we ascribe to the King Perry Philosophy of Small Business Economics (he wrote a song called “Keep a Dollar in Your Pocket”). And success rates at the office have never been better.

But we were a little shaken recently by one of our infertility patients, who announced that she was getting an abortion.

She had been trying to conceive for over 3 years and had undergone about 10 cycles of clomiphene elsewhere before she was referred to us. We bumped up her dose, added an intrauterine insemination, and she got pregnant in her first cycle here. “We didn’t think it would work so quickly!” she said. (Hey, that’s what you pay me for.)

Turns out her husband (who has a chronic medical condition) works at a local car dealership that is letting people go because of slow sales. Family health insurance will be quite expensive when the baby comes, and they may not have jobs. She went to the abortion clinic the other day, but it was too early in the pregnancy to do the procedure, and her blood pressure was really high. (I wonder if her husband is more anxious to take this route than she is – might explain the blood pressure issue, as her pressures were always fine before this.) We tried to talk her out of it, but I don’t think we changed her mind.

There is never a perfect time for a pregnancy, but this seems like irrational thinking to me. It’s a sad time for us.