IVF By The Numbers

There seems to be a misconception about how this "surrogacy thing" works and how IVF works in general.  People generally seem to think that since we went through an embryo transfer that we will have a baby in approximately 40 weeks.  Sadly, this is not the case.  This whole "surrogacy thing" was a gamble, just like IVF is a gamble.  And, it usually doesn't work the first time, or the second time or even the third time for many.

I have included the 2012 ART national success rates.  Please pay attention to the line that lists the number of live births per transfer.  You will see that for women under 35, this is 47.1%.  Meaning that for each transfer, less than half will result in a baby (also note that this is higher than the success rate for IVF cycle - some cycles are cancelled or result in no embryos making it to transfer).  This percentage goes down to 37.9% at 35-37 and 28.5% for 38-40.  We only have 3 transfers worth, that only adds up to 85.5% - leaving a 14.5% chance of nothing......

Fresh Embryos From Non-Donor Oocytes

	<35 nbsp="" p="">	35-37	38-40	41-42	42
Number of cycles	38662	19599	18410	10167	6224
Percentage of cycles resulting in pregnancies	46.7	37.8	29.7	19.8	8.6
Percentage of cycles resulting in live births	40.7	31.3	22.2	11.8	3.9
Reliability Range	(40.2 - 41.1)	(30.7 - 32.0)	(21.6 - 22.8)	(11.2 - 12.4)	(3.5 - 4.4)
Percentage of retrievals resulting in live births	43.4	34.5	25.4	14.0	5.0
Percentage of transfers resulting in live births	47.1	37.9	28.5	16.3	6.1
Percentage of cycles with elective single embryo transfer	14.8	8.9	3.0	1.2	0.6
Percentage of cancellations	6.3	9.2	12.7	15.8	21.5
Implantation Rate	37.5	27.6	18.4	9.8	3.8
Average number of embryos transferred	1.9	2.0	2.4	2.9	2.9
Percentage of live births with twins	29.5	25.0	20.3	13.4	9.0
Percentage of live births with triplets or more	1.1	0.7	0.7	0.7	0.4

51.4

48.6

44.4

37.5

28.2

19.4