The Stork Home Conception Device, UK

UK – The £100 fertility kit that spared a couple the misery of IVF: Woman with blocked fallopian tubes conceives naturally after three years of trying

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

A couple who’d given up hope of ever conceiving naturally have spoken of their joy after a £100 fertility kit gave them the ‘miracle’ baby they’d been longing for.

Sarah Capps, 33, and her husband Rob, 36, from Bishop’s Itchington, Warwickshire, had spent almost three years trying, with no success.

The couple were told their best hope of having a child was through IVF after tests eventually revealed Mrs Capps had a blocked fallopian tube. 

While they were eligible for treatment on the NHS, Mrs Capps was concerned about the invasiveness of the treatment and the side-effects of fertility drugs, which can include hot flushes, nausea and weight gain.

But in the end, there was no need for IVF.

Read more

Egg Freezing

Women could freeze their eggs for as little as $5 a day

Intended Parents

Source Daily Telegraph

AN ASIAN fertility franchise setting up shop in Melbourne says it will “transform” the fertility management industry by providing “pay as you go” egg freezing to millennial women.

XY. Life clinics, owned by Borderless Healthcare Group, says women will be able to freeze their eggs for as little as $5 a day.

Read more

Surrogate Mother

Surrogate mother, 26, who advertised her ‘womb for rent’ announces her pregnancy for a couple struggling to conceive

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

A surrogate mother who playfully advertised her ‘womb for rent’ has fallen pregnant after she made the gracious decision to help a couple struggling to conceive.

Michelle Griffin, from Perth, turned to social media to find the perfect couple who were desperate to fulfil their dream of being a family.

The 26-year-old professional birthing coach already has two children – four-year-old daughter Leilani and son Issac, aged three.

But the doting mother-of-two said she enjoyed pregnancy so much, she wanted the childless couple to experience the joys of parenthood.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, Michelle – who’s currently 15 weeks pregnant – opened up about her selfless decision to help those struggling with fertility.

Read more

Sperm Donor

Woman Wants to Meet All 44 of Her Half-Siblings, Fathered by the Same Sperm Donor

Intended Parents

Source Life News

A recent story in the Washington Post described the story of Kianni Arroyo, who is on a three-year quest to meet all of her half-siblings. It’s not as idyllic as it sounds… So far she has found forty-four of them. They live in eight states and four different countries.

The “father” of these children was, of course, a sperm donor, known affectionately to Kianni as “Donor #2757.”

Read more

Surrogate Mother

New Mom Sobs as Her Best Friend and Surrogate Delivers Her First Child

Intended Parents

Source Pop Sugar

Erin Boelhower has had a difficult journey to achieving her dream of becoming a mother. After six years of infertility, IVF, and losses, the mom welcomed her rainbow baby girl thanks to her best friend of 10 years, Rachel Checolinski, who offered to be her surrogate. Following a 12-hour labor, Rachel finally delivered baby Scottie, and Erin sobbed through the whole thing.

However, they weren’t all exactly happy tears — some were out of Erin’s concern for her friend. “How could I do this to somebody?” Erin said to Inside Edition of her thoughts during Rachel’s labor. “She just looked miserable, and I know she wanted to do it and would do it again, but it was really hard seeing someone you love doing this for you in that kind of pain.”

Read more

Egg Freezing

The Rise of Egg Freezing as a Fertility Choice

Intended Parents

Source Allure

Welcome to the business of egg freezing. It seems like everyone — fictional characters on Freeform’s The Bold Type; celebrities, like Olivia Munn, Whitney Cummings, and Rita Ora; friends and coworkers — is investing.

It’s only been six years since the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) lifted the “experimental” label from egg-freezing procedures (known formally as oocyte cryopreservation), which had been growing in number since the first live birth of a baby that had been an embryo on ice (also known as Zoe Leyland) in 1984. The New York Times has reported that more than 20,000 American women have elected to freeze their eggs — that number includes a 1,500 percent rise from 2009 to 2016, says the ASRM.

Read more

Nepal, Surrogacy

Nepal – No law on altruistic surrogacy despite Supreme Court directive

Intended Parents

Source The Himalaya Times


The government has yet to do anything about the Supreme Court directive to the government two years ago ordering it to enact a new law to govern altruistic surrogacy.

Spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Population Mahendra Shrestha said the ministry was preparing in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) policy, which was the first step to decide surrogacy issues.
“Surrogacy is not that bad but seems to have failed around the world. When a surrogate mother gives birth to a mentally retarded child or a child with congenital defects, nobody — neither the surrogate mother nor the intended parents — take custody of the child,” he said, adding that if surrogacy law was enacted, it would only be for Nepali nationals.

Read more

IVF, UK

UK – Woman who suffered SIX miscarriages and had more than 600 IVF injections weeps with joy as she holds her baby for the first time, after her best friend stepped in to serve as a surrogate

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

Erin Boelhower, 33, from Woodstock, Illinois, endured nine IVF transfers and more than 600 injections over the course of three years trying to get pregnant with husband Matthew, 33. 

Erin and Matthew were left devastated after suffering a string of miscarriages, but never lost hope that they would one day become parents.

Their dream finally became a reality when Erin’s best friend Rachel Checolinski, 34, gave them the gift of a lifetime and offered to be their surrogate.

In January, two of Erin’s embryos were transferred to Rachel’s uterus. That same month, a test revealed she was pregnant.

The pals spent the next nine months side by side and Erin was at the hospital with Rachel, herself a mother of three, when she went into labor with baby Scottie on September 19.

Read more

Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother

NZ – Surrogacy: A roller coaster ride to parenthood 

Intended Parents

Source NZ Herald

Sometimes when Amira Mikhail is caught up in the chaos of everyday life, getting her two young sons ready and out the door, she has to pause and remind herself what it took to be where she is today.
For while Mikhail always longed to have a family, her body was never on-board with the plan.

Becoming a mother has involved years of medical procedures, setbacks and heartache and, through it all, she held on to her dream, fiercely determined to see it realised.

“Honestly I didn’t have a plan B,” admits the Christchurch vet. “I just could not imagine not having kids. There was nowhere in my mind where I grew old and had no children.”

Read more

Surrogacy, Surrogate Mother

How to Find a Surrogate Mother

Intended Parents

Source Fatherly.com

A surrogate mother is a woman who carries and delivers a baby on behalf of a couple. That makes surrogacy a multifaceted arrangement with a number of medical and legal implications, both for the surrogate mother and the parents. And those implications don’t even include the tricky task of finding a surrogate mother to carry the baby.

“The surrogate can be a person that the couple knows and they recruited themselves, like a sister, or somebody from the family, or a childhood friend,” explains Elena Trukhacheva, MD, MSCI, who is the medical director of Reproductive Medicine Institute in Chicago. “Most of the time, a surrogate is recruited by the surrogacy agency. And the couple uses the surrogacy agency kind of as a middleman, to navigate the process and protect them, to some extent.”

Read more

China, Surrogacy

China – Court Orders Mother To Return $1.4 Million in Surrogacy Money

Intended Parents

Source Sixth Tone

A court in China’s central Hunan province has ordered a woman to return the money she received for her surrogacy — a controversial case that highlights the murky legalities in the country surrounding the practice.

In a verdict announced last month but only made public Friday, the Tianxin District People’s Court in Changsha demanded Zeng Meili return the 10 million yuan ($1.44 million) from Peng Shimin — both pseudonyms used by the court due to privacy concerns — for delivering twin boys in 2013. Peng’s wife had filed a lawsuit against Zeng and her husband in 2016 asking the court to retrieve the money Peng spent from their joint financial account. The wife said she was unaware of the surrogacy as well as the birth of the twins.

Read more

IVF, No Needle IVF

No-Needle In Vitro Fertilization Offers New Hope To Women Struggling To Become Pregnant

Intended Parents

Source New York

For women who are trying to become pregnant, it can be an anguishing time. In vitro fertilization has proven to be successful for many, but it comes with its own set of anxiety in the form of expensive injections.

Now, a new, no-needle IVF treatment is showing promise.

Becoming a mother was everything for one woman who spoke with CBS2. Today, she has a beautiful 20-month-old daughter, but getting pregnant was far more difficult than she ever could have imagined.

“I wasn’t even like, 35 at this point and here I’m being told I can’t get pregnant,” she said.

Read more

Supreme Court

More Good News From The Supreme Court!

Intended Parents

Source Above The Law

Earlier this month, the Court denied certiorari (or “cert”) in the Melissa Cook case. There, a California surrogate tried to take legal custody of the triplets she carried for someone else, and asked the Court to declare California’s surrogacy statute unconstitutional in full. The Court declined to hear the case, and no justice dissented from the denial of cert.

Read more

IVF

Why single embryo transfer during IVF sometimes results in twins or triplets

Intended Parents

Source Eureka Alert

It has been known for some time that it is better to transfer a single embryo to a woman’s womb during assisted reproduction treatment (ART) rather than several embryos in order to avoid a multiple pregnancy and the risks associated with it such as foetal deaths, miscarriage, premature delivery and low birthweight. However, even when single embryo transfer (SET) is performed, some women still become pregnant with twins or even triplets.

In a study published today (Tuesday) in Human Reproduction[1], one of the world’s leading reproductive medicine journals, researchers have investigated one of the reasons why this happens and have, for the first time, been able to calculate that the proportion of multiple pregnancies after SET is 1.6% and that 1.36% of multiple pregnancies after SET occur as a result of a process called zygotic splitting

Read more

Egg Freezing, UK

UK – EXCLUSIVE: Are women being sold an expensive fertility lie? One round of egg freezing is NOT enough for even the most fertile to have a 60% chance of getting pregnant

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

More and more women are putting their eggs on ice – for which a single extraction costs between $9,000 and $12,000, plus $500 per year for storage.
However, since the process is relatively new, there has been little concrete evidence to show what the chances are of making a return on that investment.

New data on 800 women, being presented at a conference this week, suggest that, even for the most fertile group under 34 years old, achieving the modest goal of a 60 percent success rate is not likely with one round alone.  

Read more

Europe, Infertility

Europe rights court asked to weigh in on France surrogacy case

Intended Parents

Source Jurist

The French Court of Cassation announced on Friday its decision to request an advisory opinion from the European Court of Human Rights in a case that could have important consequences for couples who are unable to conceive naturally. At issue is a dispute involving a French family whose twin girls were born with the assistance of a gestational surrogate in the United States. Because surrogacy is illegal in France and the woman asserting parental rights over the children is not their biological mother, French authorities have refused to accept the American birth certificates bearing the woman’s name.

Read more

Ireland, Surrogacy

Irish surrogacy rates are world’s second-highest

Intended Parents

Source The Times

Ireland has been found to have the second-highest rate of surrogacy use, according to a survey involving 90 countries. The Irish government is planning to ban all commercial surrogacy as part of its Assisted Human Reproduction Bill.

The survey — carried out last year by Families Through Surrogacy (FTS), an international non-profit organisation that supports couples going through the process — reveals Ireland is second only to Israel in the rate of use of surrogacy.

Families Through Surrogacy based its finding on the answers given by 30 agencies in nine countries dealing with clients from 90 nations. It found that 68% of surrogacies carried out for Irish couples took place in Ukraine.

Read more

Gender Selection, UK

UK couples going to the north to select gender of their babies

Intended Parents

Source Cyprus Mail

British couples wanting to evade UK law to select the gender of their child are opting to carry out the procedure in the north where ‘everything is legal’, the Daily Mail has reported.

An investigation by the newspaper on Sunday said that couples are legally arranging preliminary tests and scans in private UK clinics before being sent to centres abroad for the final procedure of gender selection.

One such fertility centre is the Crown IVF Centre in Famagusta, founded and run by Halil Ibrahim Tekin, a consultant gynaecologist and specialist in reproductive medicine and surgery.

Read more

IVF

IVF is less successful in black women even though they produce more viable eggs and embryos – and researchers admit they don’t know why 

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

Most believe that the most important number to look for is how many eggs and embryos are retrieved.

But new research shows that there may be other factors at play, especially for black patients, who have a 14 percent lower live birth rate than white women, according to data from a large clinic in Washington, DC. 

Some of the discrepancy can be explained by the fact that the African American patients were more likely to be older, with a higher BMI. 

However, the researchers of the study warn much of it is likely caused by biological factors that we don’t understand because black women are under-studied in medical research.  

Read more