For me, IVF and other fertility programs can have a darker and less happy side
        
            By Blake Turck, 
                The Washington Post
             | 11. 13. 2021
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
            
As a little girl, I never dreamed of motherhood. When I got married at 36, I assumed pregnancy would come easily. A year later it did, although at 18 weeks I experienced a devastating miscarriage. And a second early miscarriage not long after.
About 1 in 4 women experience baby loss; 1 in 8, infertility. As my 40th birthday loomed, I turned to in vitro fertilization, like many women my age with similar loss experiences. According to a 2018 study, 33 percent of Americans have used IVF or another form of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to get pregnant, or know of someone who has. That number is expected to grow.
But beyond the sweet images of healthy newborns used to illustrate IVF services, there’s a darker and less happy side to IVF that some people may not realize. Most significantly, it’s not that easy to have a baby with ART. The truth, I learned, is far more complicated — and painful.
I’d never heard of any fertility acronyms often bandied about during this process — such as TWW (a...
 
       
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
      Related Articles
    
  
          
  
  
  
  
  
  
      
            
                  
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           By Abby McCloskey,  The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
                                                        
     
    
    
            We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
    
    
            Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           By Julia Black,  MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
                                                        
     
    
    
            Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           By Lizzy Lawrence,  Stat News | 10.14.2025