Decoding Infertility: What Every Woman Needs to Know Before Trying IVF
In the world of fertility treatments, In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) takes center stage. And while it's a popular method that’s helped so many women get pregnant, what most couples don’t know is that jumping straight to this procedure is rarely the best approach to growing your family.
IVF doesn’t have to be your first choice, and it’s certainly not your only option. In fact, IVF success rates vary greatly and are frequently misunderstood. The process tends to come with a lot of unrealistic expectations, several side effects, and a hefty price tag. And unfortunately, it doesn’t always result in a baby.
Even though IVF is often talked about as a surefire route to pregnancy, it's anything but a guaranteed solution to your fertility issues. The good news is that there are several proactive steps you can take to prepare your body for pregnancy that will improve your success rate with IVF. And for most women, these steps lead to a natural conception, bypassing the need for IVF altogether.
Before you set your heart on any one particular fertility treatment, book a Fertility Consult to learn how to optimize your health so your body’s in tip top shape before trying to get pregnant (even if you do end up doing IVF).
How Does The IVF Process Work?
So many women begin IVF treatment without fully understanding what’s going to happen. Doctors aren’t always the best at explaining things, and with your hopes set on having a baby, it’s easy to convince yourself to trust the experts instead of getting the answers to the questions you really want to know.
Questions like . . .
How is this going to affect your hormones?
Is IVF going to affect the health of your ovaries or have an impact on future pregnancies?
How many eggs are they going to retrieve?
What if you don’t get pregnant the first time around?
What are the long term side effects?
It's so important that you have a full understanding of the procedure, its potential outcomes, and alternative options before deciding if this is the best option for you.
Here's a simplified step-by-step explanation of how the IVF process works:
Ovarian Stimulation: The first step in IVF involves injecting hormones to stimulate your ovaries to produce multiple eggs — rather than the single egg that normally develops each month. Multiple eggs are needed because some eggs won't develop or fertilize after retrieval.
Egg Retrieval: A minor surgical procedure, known as follicular aspiration, is done to remove the eggs from your body. Using ultrasound images as a guide, a thin needle is inserted through the vagina and into an ovary. The needle, which is connected to a suction device, is used to extract the eggs from the follicles.
Insemination and Fertilization: The retrieved eggs are placed together with male sperm and kept in a controlled environmental condition to encourage fertilization. In some cases where the likelihood of fertilization is low, a single sperm may be injected directly into the egg, this process is known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).
Embryo Culture: The fertilized eggs (embryos) remain in the laboratory for observation to ensure optimal growth. During this period, embryos are tested for genetic disorders, if these tests were requested.
Embryo Transfer: The final step of the IVF procedure involves transferring the embryo into the woman's uterus. This is typically done using a thin tube, or catheter. It enters the uterus through the vagina. When the embryo sticks to the lining of the uterus, healthy embryo growth can begin.
The Two Week Wait: After the procedure, bed rest is often advised for around 24 hours. About two weeks after the embryo transfer, you'll undergo a blood test to determine whether the treatment has resulted in pregnancy.
What are the Disadvantages of IVF?
While IVF can be incredibly effective for some women, it doesn't guarantee success for everyone, and there are a lot of disadvantages of taking the IVF route first before exploring other options.
One IVF cycle usually isn’t enough, and a main reason the IVF process can fail is because of an embryo transfer that doesn’t stick. On average, about 30% of healthy embryos transferred to the uterus do not implant. This is a major reason why women often end up needing to do multiple cycles of IVF, and why the 50-70% success rate you see in the brochures at your doctor’s office are typically after 8 rounds.
For most couples, especially those where the woman is younger than 40, approximately 65% will achieve a live birth after 5 or 6 treatment cycles. For women over 40, the odds of having a baby with their own eggs via IVF significantly decreases. The statistics for a 42 year old’s chance of having a baby using her own eggs is a mere 4%.
Each round of IVF isn’t without consequence. With every cycle comes added stress on your body, your emotions, your relationship, and your wallet.
What are the Risks and Side Effects of IVF?
Poor Ovarian Reserve: Think of it this way—you were born with a finite number of eggs, and an average of 10-20 eggs are retrieved during each cycle of IVF. If you’re already of advanced maternal age, and IVF doesn’t work for you, you’re diminishing your options at a rapid rate. Each round of IVF is taking 1 to 2 years’ worth of your eggs all at once. This is why IVF is basically borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. While it’s an attempt at solving an immediate problem, it often leads to more hardship and trouble down the road.
So instead of skipping right to IVF, why not take the necessary steps to make sure all of those eggs are healthy? This not only sets you up better for IVF success so you only have to go through the process once, but after about 4-6 months of making the right changes, most women are actually able to get pregnant naturally!
Overstimulation of Ovaries: The medications you’ll be given to help release the eggs for IVF do so by stimulating the ovaries, but oftentimes they end up getting stimulated too much. In rare cases, the ovaries can become very swollen and even leak fluid into the belly and chest area. What’s much more common though is that this hyperstimulation of the ovaries ends up throwing off your entire endocrine system and seriously messing up your thyroid.
This blowback to your thyroid might not come to its full fruition with your first round of IVF, but after 2 or 3 cycles, your body is going to have a very difficult time trying to regulate all of the hormones flooding through your system. And with enough time, you likely won’t even be able to produce your own hormones anymore.
Your ovaries are in direct communication with your pituitary gland, and that’s why it’s so important to reestablish that connection so everything is signaling correctly to keep your thyroid in check and your hormones balanced BEFORE beginning IVF. This will drastically increase your success rate and spare you from so many nasty hormonal issues later on.
IVF is Expensive and Not Covered by Insurance: Each IVF cycle costs between $15,000 and $30,000, and insurance won’t cover around 80% of it. That’s a lot of money for something with so many negative side effects and no guarantee that it will even work. This isn’t saying IVF isn’t a worthwhile investment, but why would you gamble your savings away or rack up a bunch of debt without first doing the legwork to give yourself a chance at the absolute best success rate possible?
Have you properly detoxed your body? Is your liver open and able to break down toxic substances? Have you reduced your inflammation and made sure that the blood flowing through your ovaries and nourishing your eggs is nutrient dense? Are you eating a fertility-friendly diet that gives you a good chance your embryo will stick? Have you gotten functional fertility labs done to know exactly what red flags are keeping you from conceiving?
Don’t put your fertility fate in your doctor’s hands. Put in your best work beforehand to prepare for IVF implantation (or conceiving naturally!) and give yourself the best shot at having this baby.
When is IVF the Best Option?
So many women feel like their fertility is out of their control and the only option is IVF. Western medicine preaches that as you age, your eggs will decline in both quality and quantity. And they seem to push anyone and everyone directly to Clomid, IUI, and IVF. But they don’t look at how your nutrition, overall lifestyle, and micronutrients can be used to actually improve your fertility. Their perspective is extremely narrow, but the progressive fertility approach is very different.
At Magnolia Wellness, we have personally witnessed massive miracles that Western medicine would say are impossible. We’ve seen FSH levels return to that of a 28 year old for women in their late 30s. Hundreds of women have reduced their inflammation, healed their bodies, and gotten pregnant when they were told they had no other option besides IVF. Women with less than a 1% chance of conceiving have had happy, healthy babies . . . naturally.
Here’s the perfect example. One woman had a pituitary tumor, was on Western medication, and had been trying to get pregnant for 4 years. Her doctor told her she had less than a 1% chance of having a baby. She was pregnant 4 months after her Fertility Consult. Another woman had both of her fallopian tubes completely blocked. Her doctor told her she had absolutely no chance of conceiving on her own and that IVF was her only option. She got pregnant naturally!
Your body is miraculous and can heal itself when it’s given the right foundational principles and tools. Your doctor might have told you that you don’t have the ability to get pregnant, but I’m telling you you can. One of the best gifts that I can give my clients is hope. Think about the messages you’re telling your body. Every single day your body replicates cells, and growing and expanding those cells from a place of hope and promise is a complete game changer.
There is a Place for IVF, but Not Until We’ve Exhausted all the Other Possibilities.
Your doctor will tell you the only way they can help you get pregnant is through invasive treatments and medications, and your doctor is right. That is the only way they’re able to help you because those are the only tools they have. But we have an entirely different set of tools.
Unless you’re anatomically challenged (for instance you’re a gay couple meeting with a surrogate because you don’t have a uterus), it’s best to get to the root cause of why your body isn’t getting pregnant naturally. Then if we’ve truly exhausted all possibilities, we will work with your reproductive endocrinologist to ensure that your IVF or IUI transfer is as successful as possible.
But until we do all the necessary legwork first to get beyond your “unexplained” infertility diagnosis, there is no reason why you should be looking at IVF. It’s not necessary to spend upwards of $30,000 for IVF when nobody has bothered to do the really specific testing to understand exactly why you’re not getting pregnant.
Whether you’ve already seen a doctor or you’re just starting your fertility journey, there’s no need to waste your time trying Clomid, IUI, or IVF.
Booking a Fertility Consult is the first step to fast tracking your fertility. On this private call, you’ll have a chance to ask all the questions you have about your specific situation and we can talk about the functional fertility labs available and how they’re much more thorough than any test a typical Western medicine doctor might offer.
You’re not alone. Getting pregnant without IVF is possible for you. Let me show you the way.