A New Last Chance 

There could soon be a baby-boom among women who thought they’d hit an IVF dead end.

Monica Halem calls it the “fertility train.” Every woman who embarks on a cycle of in vitro fertilization is familiar with the ride: the multiple cycles of hormonal stimulation, the pain of the injections, the discomfort and the bloating; then the delicate harvest of eggs to be fertilized outside the body, and the anxious wait for genetic testing on the embryos to make sure they have the right number of chromosomes before they are transferred back; and then, if all of the embryo tests come back abnormal, or the embryos don’t implant, or the pregnancy ends prematurely in miscarriage, the process starts all over again.

“It’s a lot of highs, right?” Halem says. “You’re getting excited, you’re ready. And then when it doesn’t work, which is more times than not, it’s a very low low. Such a depressing low. I mean, there’s-been-times-I-couldn’t-get-out-of-bed low.”

Read more about what happened to the embryos and results here:

https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/ivf-abnormal-embryos-new-last-chance.html