Assisted Reproductive Technology: Let's Focus on One Healthy Baby at a Time

The hubbub of Kate Plus 8 and Nadya Suleman is largely over. One year ago, articles covering multiple births and stories of in vitro fertilization were front-page news, but today I’m hard-pressed to name even a celebrity who has had a high-order multiple in the last few months. While I take this as good news, the data on assisted reproductive technologies (ART) tells a slightly different story.

Assisted reproductive technology includes fertility treatments in which both eggs and sperm are handled in the laboratory—this includes in vitro fertilization (IVF). It is well-documented that women who undergo IVF are more likely to deliver multiple-birth infants than women who conceive without assistance.  In fact, almost half of all IVF pregnancies result in multiple-birth deliveries.[i] Pregnancy with multiples is usually a direct result of multiple embryo transfer. This means that two or more embryos are transferred to a woman’s uterus at one time. And although the percentage of triplet-or-more births has declined from 6 percent to 2 percent from 1998 to 2007, the percentage of twin births remained stable at about 30 percent...