About Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) and How to Prepare?

Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) has come a long way in the last 20 years. Without these remarkable advances, many couples would not have met with their dream of a baby. The aim of fertility treatments is to increase your chance of conception by optimizing the environment in which your egg and sperm meet.

What exactly assisted reproductive technologies are and how to prepare for the procedure and increase your chances of success?

Most Common Procedures

Most reproductive therapy or fertility clinics that practice ART are set up to accommodate methods that include:

• In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) – A procedure whereby eggs are retrieved after approximately two menstrual cycles that include a specified hormone protocol. After egg retrieval, egg quality is identified. The highest quality eggs are combined with the sperm in a laboratory dish for fertilization. An embryologist monitors what are now embryos until they are ready to be transferred back into the uterus for natural development. Embryo transfer occurs, on average, from 3 to 5 days after egg retrieval, depending on whether or not you are a candidate for blastocyst embryo transfer. The IVF success rate is the highest of all the ART procedures.
• Intrauterine Implantation (IUI) – A procedure, also known as Artificial Insemination, whereby the sperm is washed and placed in a concentrated quantity as close to the egg as possible in the uterus at the time of ovulation.
• Egg Donor – a fertility treatment option if it is determined that the egg quality of the woman trying to conceive is poor. The procedure is similar to the IVF procedure (the eggs to be transferred are retrieved from the egg donor), with some adjustments in the hormone protocol. This allows a woman to carry and birth a child conceived by combining her male partner’s sperm with a donated egg, in which the quality of the egg has a higher chance of fertilization leading to embryo transfer and natural development in her own uterus.

The above is a brief overview of the primary Assisted Reproductive Therapies. There certainly are other options, as well as nuances to the above procedures. The choice for ART is a very personal choice for each woman and/or couple. The consideration often involves the individual’s ethical stance, emotional wherewithal, financial abilities, religious and/or spiritual beliefs, and current male/female infertility diagnosis to name a few.

How to Prepare for Assisted Reproductive Technology?

Would you spend over $10,000 on, say, a home entertainment center, if there were less than a 50/50 chance that it would work when you got it home and set up? Would you buy a car, a boat, or a vacation if your odds were less than 50% that you would get what you were paying for?

Thousands of women and couples are taking precisely this kind of gamble every day on medical interventions to help them conceive, hoping and praying that they will have a baby to show for it.

It is estimated that more than 1 in 6 couples is unable to conceive without some form of medical intervention; – according to The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. This indicates that there are quite a number of couples who are faced with having to spend some amount of money to assist mother-nature in baby making. The cost of an IVF with office visits, ultrasounds, labs, medications can easily be $10,000 or more.

Emotional costs not included. Yet, the success rate with assisted reproductive technologies is usually below 50%.

Trying to keep one’s financial head straight, while making such emotional decisions like whether to do IVF, IUI, Clomid or Alternative Fertility Therapies to help bring a baby into the world, is a huge challenge. Most couples put far too much faith in the conception method they have selected while placing far too little attention on increasing their own readiness for these methods to work.

5 Keys to optimize your chances of fertility success!

Let’s talk about 5 keys to optimizing your own readiness so that your chosen conception methods have a much greater chance of succeeding. Some of them may seem obvious, but I still observe women and couples thinking they can forego the basics. And they still want to get pregnant. If you are struggling with infertility, and you’ve chosen to spend money on conception methods, then you owe it to yourself to optimize your readiness accordingly. It will save you money in the long-run.

1. Sleep: Human beings have a primal physiological need for sleep. Sleep is where our body rejuvenates, recharges, and repairs itself. Without enough, quality (sleep through the night) sleep, your body will fall behind on repair, cellular rebuilding, and reproductive health. It couldn’t be more obvious that if your body can’t even keep up with its own physiological needs it certainly can’t do it for a growing fetus. In fact, the body automatically turns reproduction/fertility off until its own physiology is back in balance. Do not sacrifice your sleep.
2. Nutrition: During sleep and all throughout the day, our body is pulling nutrients out of your bloodstream to perform a myriad of functions. Balancing hormones, making energy available, exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide, mediating stress, detoxifying everything that comes into our system and the list goes on. Our body can only do a job as good as the nutrients we supply it. What falls in the category of nutrition is everything you put into your system.
3. Stress Management: Let’s just say that stress is anything that requires your body to spend energy to stabilize. Inflammation, work deadlines, too much sugar in the system, traffic, lack of sleep, work and rest out of balance, lack of proper nutrients, relationship upsets, bottled up emotions (anger, bitterness etc.), environmental toxins, and the list goes on. Sometimes it seems like a losing battle. It isn’t really though, because as long as your body/being is balanced, it can handle stress. I suggest you begin a list of things that you need to eliminate in order to take some stressors out of your life. Just as important, start a list of things that you might need to add to your life to help you stay balanced. Then create a plan to eliminate and add those things in your life.
4. Mental/Emotional Balance: Every thought we think leads to an emotion. Every emotion carries a particular frequency of energy to it. Emotional energy is either tearing us down or building us up. We are either expressing emotions in a healthy way, expressing emotions in sideways, unhealthy ways, or bottling emotions up. Because we live in a society with a fair amount of drama, it is sometimes hard for us to see what is healthy and what isn’t with our own emotions. I suggest you start observing yourself and how you think and feel about all the aspects of your life so that you can make the necessary adjustments to being conscious about your mental/emotional balance.
5. Spiritual Connection: Whether you are nourished by a church community or a particular spiritual path, it is wise to keep in mind that your spiritual connection is no different from any other relationship you have. You must spend time with, and foster this connection for it to grow and support you in your life. It is best not to place this very important relationship/connection last on your priority list, as it is one of, if not the most important relationship you tend to.

Any conception method will have the greatest chances of succeeding in the right environment. That environment is you. Your physiological health, as well as your psycho-spiritual health is what creates your conception readiness for success. It’s not only about hormone shots, transfer dates, and acupuncture for the best success rates. It is about those things after you have prepared yourself properly.

LoraM

Lora M. is the director of Fertility Health Services in San Diego, California and is the author of the different books  and audio CD series. Lora’s work is marked by a ready warmth and deep empathy for all those she serves. People from all walks of life have benefited from her keen ability to help them connect with their deepest selves — and experience their fullest potential for health, happiness and wholeness.