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It was a cold and overcast morning in November, but one full of promise for Guo Meiyan and her husband: They would finally get a chance to start a family.

As Ms. Guo, 39, was wheeled on a gurney into a hospital room where a doctor transferred her eggs, which had been harvested and fertilized, back into her uterus, she also felt a sense of dread.

“If the transplant is not successful, all the money we spent will be wasted, all the pain I endured will be wasted, and we will have to start over again,” said Ms. Guo, who had traveled 125 miles to Beijing from the northern city of Zhangjiakou. She and her husband had been living in hotels to be near the hospital for a month during the final stage of the in vitro fertilization process.

They are among hundreds of thousands of Chinese couples who turn to assisted reproductive technology every year after exhausting other options to get pregnant. They travel from all corners of the country to big cities like Beijing in the hopes of...