Several difficult and complex steps have to be gone through so that you can have your baby: harvesting your eggs; fertilization of the eggs by healthy sperm; implantation of at least one embryo into your uterus; pregnancy to term, and delivery of a healthy baby.
Ensuring a Good Egg Supply
So that you have the best chance of a successful pregnancy through IVF treatment, more than one egg at a time is removed for fertilization. Normally a woman will only shed one egg during each ovarian cycle, but a few days after the end of your period your ovaries will be stimulated with drug treatment to make them produce more than one egg. You’ll be given drugs, such as clomiphene or hMG (human menopausal gonadotrophin), so that your ovaries produce a number of eggs simultaneously.
Over the next week or so you’ll need to go to the fertility clinic every day so that the development of your eggs can be carefully monitored with ultrasound scans. As the eggs mature, the follicles containing them swell and produce increasing amounts of estrogen. A series of blood tests will detect this increase in estrogen, and the growth of follicles can be precisely measured and tracked by a daily scan.
Collecting the Eggs
When ovulation is imminent, your mature eggs are collected at your clinic under ultrasonic or laparoscopic guidance. Then
they’re ready for fertilization by your partner’s sperm.
Ultrasonic guidance The use of ultrasound pictures to guide the egg retrieval probe is less invasive than using a laparoscope. It can be carried out under light or local anesthetic, instead of a general, and you’ll need to spend only a few hours at the fertility clinic.
Laparoscopy. This is an another method of viewing your abdominal cavity. The laparoscope, a small, very thin telescope, is passed into your pelvic cavity through a small incision made in your navel. It gives the surgeon direct vision while using a fine, hollow probe to collect ripened eggs from your ovaries. You’ll need a general anesthetic for a laparoscopy, and a small amount of carbon dioxide gas will be injected into your abdominal cavity to separate the organs so that the surgeons can see them more easily.
Confirming Conception
The harvested eggs are mixed with your partner’s semen, and 18 hours later they’re inspected under a microscope to find out if any have been fertilized. It’s uncommon for all the eggs to be fertilized. It’s uncommon for all the eggs to be fertilized and develope into embryos, but two or three usually do. Fertilized eggs are incubated for 48 hours or more, when they will have divided into two to four cells. Provided they show no signs of abnormality, a maximum of three embryos are transferred to your uterus.