Many people in the field will not like what I’m going to reveal. I’m tired of seeing such an unethical and greedy attitude to clients. I hope this information will jeopardize well estab-lished working patterns in the clinics. The information below will mostly concern French clinics, but the same practices can be seen all over the world. For safety reasons, I’m not going to reveal my full identity. A few things I am leaving about myself is that I’m a practic-ing doctor in one of the most respectful fertility clinics in France. I’ve been working in the field of ART for 14 years. I’ll start with basics and gradually move to the topic itself.
In vitro fertilization is a well-known procedure performed to treat infertility. More and more people are attracted by its availability and relatively simple execution. New studies persuade us that the success rate for women undergoing IVF treatment has peaked at one in four in recent years. But is it true? Let us take a look at the current situation.
Pregnancy rates in Europe per started treatment are calculated at 27.1% after IVF. Mass media praise this result as the absolute maximum and as approval of definite success. Yes, a 27% result is encouraging, but it is not a peak.
I’ll be concentrating on the situation in France. Reports say that approximately 25.5% of live births in France occur with the help of in vitro fertilization. As a French fertility specialist, I claim that this number could be much higher. Now I want to speak honestly about the true situation there. I work for one of the most respectful French fertility clinics. I requested for anonymity to get a possibility to be totally honest about our methods of infertility treatment.
The recent surge of in vitro fertilization popularity creates new ways for clinics to take ad-vantage of their gullible clients. My clinic mainly deals with IVF and ICSI procedures; we conduct about 300 IVFs a year. Less than one-third of them ends up in a pregnancy. It is a low result and I want to explain why it happens so.
35-years old woman wanted to be an egg donor. She had a low AMH level – 0.9 ng/ml. Her LH and FSH levels are both high, that’s not good at all for being a donor, but we don’t have other options. In France, egg donation programs are voluntary and unpaid. So we agreed to start the stimulation and to get as many eggs as possible. I was thinking that we will not retrieve more than 4 eggs. I was right and egg quality wasn’t good either so we knew that the lifespan of such eggs will not be more than 4 days. I thought that it would be a real achievement to fertilize at least 2 of them for our patient. We decided to transfer embryos on the second day of a fertilization process. It is not medically right because the possibility of successful implantation significantly reduced. We pretend that everything was done in the right way and the only possible explanation of the failure is a state of clients’ health. That’s partially correct, but we do much to enhance the image of the clinic. Embryos are so weak sometimes that they will not survive till the third day. Instead of telling clients the truth about their conditions we do the transfer before embryos may die. Yes, there is al-ways a possibility of their surviving, but we can’t risk our reputation. That is the main rea-son for such a low successful IVF rate in France.
The most likely outcome for the client who undergoes IVF procedures will be the embryo implantation failure. In such a case, we would recommend trying again or using other do-nor eggs. This is why so many patients fly to Spain for donor eggs. And this is not the end.
We use the same donor eggs for many clients to reduce the expenses. For example, we stimulate one woman donor for one couple, get about 10 eggs of high quality and distribute them among several waiting couples. If we used all 10 eggs with only one couple, the possibility of successful fertilization would be very high. The fewer eggs we have, the less is the possibility. It is incredibly unfair towards clients, and you need to understand that money that clinic charges for procedures are taxpayers’ money, it’s mine and yours. But I can’t do anything with that well established and widely used system.
It drives me crazy that we need to care less about patients and more about financial suc-cess and the image of the clinic. Hundreds of couples are trying to start a family, they wait a long time for the match with an egg donor but it doesn’t lead to success. Meanwhile, clinics get richer with taxpayers’ money by lying to patients, violating procedures protocols and unfair use of donors’ eggs. We work in the field of ART to make it easier for couples to be-come a family, instead, we are working not for the people but the profit of the clinic.
My message for those couples who are desperately wanting to have a child and came to trying IVF is to not to leave your treatment process untended. It is so easy to deceive morally weakened and tired people. Don’t fall for well-advertised clinics with so-called high success rates. You should pay close attention to each stage of the IVF cycle and have good knowledge about the procedure itself. Only this way you can, to a certain degree, protect yourself from such unfair actions.
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