Have been a fan of Mothering for awhile, but just found this forum. I was looking for a place to talk about natural parenting strategies after infertility treatment -- particularly the heavily invasive stuff like IVF.
In our late twenties my husband and stopped using birth control and figured that pregnancy would eventually happen, but it didn't. Ended up at a fertility clinic. After a diagnosis of "unknown infertility" for us, as a couple, the MD said, "you could go ahead and start out with clomid and iuis, but the success rates are low. So why not just fast forward, and go straight to IVF?" (Insurance at the time covered it partially). From that IVF we have a 3 1/2 year old daughter, born in 2008. During my pregnancy I allowed one ultrasound to confirm the heartbeat. After that, I went the midwife route ... becoming more radical the more I read (we already leaned heavily in the radical thought/simple living direction). I had no further ultrasounds. Don't trust the sound and heat waves. I made the midwife use a fetoscope and I did a homebirth. The extremely overbooked midwife did not show up at my homebirth, but that's another story ...
Although it is interwoven ... because after going through all of the tests, hormones, needles, surgeries associated with IVF and infertility--who in the world gives birth unassisted at home (albiet unintentionally). In Baltimore, MD, natural birth choices are very limited. Many of my third trimester checkups were canceled because the poor midwife was attending a birth almost every day, sometimes two. She was the only midwife in this city who does homebirths, and she has since been put out of business by a lawsuit from a Johns Hopkins obstetrician ... Three days before my due date, the midwife's assistant noted that my fundal height had dropped. The assistant tried to make me do a last minute ultrasound. I went home and read that in situations of dropping fundal height / possible medical scenarios and that doing an ultrasound will likely lead to an emergency c-section, but that the ultrasound and/ or c-section statistically would not influence outcomes. So I just cut the hedges to help induce labor. I kept telling myself that a pregnancy that comes out of ivf is not high-risk pregnancy and I wasn't going to let anyone turn it into one. I'd heard too many horror stories from women hooked up to anti-biotic drips, with internal fetal dopplers, having their water broken without permission ... Perhaps having a very natural pregnancy was something I was particularly determined to have, after all of the daily invasive exams / long list of other crap I'd had to go through in order to get pregnant. My healthy daughter weighed only 4 lbs 6 ounces at birth. Later, I read that full term IVF babies are more likely to have low birth rates. No further info. The data doesn't exist. We did go to the hospital after she was born, to have her checked out due to low birth weight. Experiences there convinced me that I was luck to have at least given birth at home...
In 2011, now paying fully out of pocket, we did an unsuccessful frozen embryo transfer. After bad experiences, decided to transfer to another clinic ... Had polyp removal surgery. Then another fet. Got a positive pregnancy test two weeks ago! Two betas look good so far. The new clinic wants to do three ultrasounds to confirm a healthy clinical pregnancy. Most fertility clinics only do one to confirm a heartbeat before releasing you into prenatal care. I have told them that they can only do one and haven't heard back yet. Thus, I enter into the beginning of a second pregnancy, still paranoid and in disbelief--a state of mind that is particularly characteristic for women who go through fertility treatment. More now than the last time, I seem to be expecting something to go wrong. Our embies were frozen when I was 35. But now I'm 39. And in contrast to before, now I'm overweight (partially due to the fertility hormones and birth control pills, which my body really didn't respond well to). How many of us are doing natural pregnancies after ivf? What kind of doubt/ psychological torture do we put ourselves through, when we choose low tech/ against the grain pregnancies and births after high tech fertility treatment? Would love to share thoughts and compare experiences.
Edited by Mensch00 - 8/11/12 at 10:38pm
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