The Success Rates From IVF are Nowhere Near What People Think

“Test tube babies” are not that rare these days.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1.5% of babies born in the US are conceived using what’s called Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), of which the most common procedure is in vitro fertilization (IVF).

IVF is a procedure in which eggs are taken from a woman’s ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a petri dish. Then one or more fertilised embryos are placed in the woman’s uterus, where one will hopefully implant and grow into a baby.

Though thousands of IVF cycles are done every year in the US, it’s tricky to get a sense of an individual woman’s chance of conceiving with the procedure. The graphs below, from the CDC, show exactly how often IVF resulted in a baby for women who went through the costly treatment using their own eggs, not donor eggs. A single IVF cycle costs an average of $US12,400, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), and women often need multiple tries to get pregnant.

About 36% of IVF...