The NICE guidelines recommend that the NHS also finance IVF for women 40 to 42. Yet IVF does not treat nor even identify the cause of any infertility.  It also spoils the dream for couples that a child is the result of a loving act within their marriage. Natural Procreative Technology works with couples and first of all searches for the underlying pathology. Treatment is much more gentle as it works with the body not trying to force the body. As a result side effects are much rarer, the conception process stays with the couple and because it is not trying to make an egg that has been there since before the woman’s birth survive the strange environment of a laboratory, it is actually more likely to be successful. Ah – and it’s cheaper too!

Why is the internet so dominated by IVF? I tried to google ‘alternative to IVF’ and could not find Life FertilityCare up to page 60 (then I gave up). There was a link to a blog that mentioned NaProTechnology on page 21 and the Irish FertilityCare.net website on p.23, but who really searches that far? What amazed me was that apart from the odd complementary therapy service, all the pages are dominated by various derivative forms of IVF provision which are nothing of any alternative really. Since when do surrogacy or donor sperm or egg, or IVF abroad count as alternatives to the assisted reproductive technologies! The internet seems to be saturated with IVF. Yet this is not what couples are looking for when they type in ‘alternatives to IVF’. So why is this is so and when will it change?

Great news of another study on the uses of NaProTechnology (NPT) within an urban GP practice was published in the Canadian Family Physician journal. It basically corroborates data previously published from Ireland.  It also confirmed the benefit in terms of success to stick with NPT for a full 2 years as doing so raised the success rate from 38% to 66% when compared with those who left the programme early. To read the abstract and full study: http://www.cfp.ca/content/58/5/e267.full.pdf%2Bhtml

Yesterday’s New York Times ran an article about embryo reduction after IVF (the two-Minus-One Pregnancy article by Ruth Padawer).  I was struck by the woman’s comment in the article explaining her choice which read:

“If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner – in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me – and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

One comment does not constitute evidence that overall IVF couples view conceptions differently, but the article later states that demand for this kind of embryo reduction is rising. How very much in contrast this is to NaProTechnology which by keeping medicine within natural order assists couples to experience the natural conception of any child as a gift.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/magazine/the-two-minus-one-pregnancy.html?_r=2