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29.01.2019 10:15:38
Modern reproductive medicine offers a variety of techniques that adapt couples as far as their health is concerned to each individual situation. However, a prerequisite for this treatment is compliance with a couple of legal prescriptions.
Women, if they still want to give birth to a child at a very late age, have to seek help abroad, such as the 65-year-old Annegret Raunig from Berlin, who is expecting quadruples after IVF. In Germany this is prohibited by law. So Annegret R. underwent treatment in a Ukrainian clinic.
Couples should know the following:
However, how does such a treatment of infertility generally go on? What forms are allowed in Germany? We will answer the most important questions concerning artificial insemination.
IVF is short for in vitro fertilization. Fertilization takes place outside the body in a Petri dish. There, the doctor makes an egg and sperm meet. Before IVF, women are administered follicle stimulating hormones so that several eggs mature, thereby increasing the chances of pregnancy.
According to the German IVF Registry, about 48,000 patients underwent such treatment in 2012, and there were more than 10,000 deliveries. Approximately two out of a hundred children in Germany were born thanks to IVF.
If parents are afraid to pass on severe genetic diseases to their child, as a rule, it is possible for them to go through preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). In this case, it is determined whether the embryo obtained in an artificial way is the carrier of such defective genes. The doctor gives the woman only a healthy embryo.
There are still discussions between opponents of PGD, who consider PGD to be a violation of ethical norms, and supporters who see benefits for couples whose families have genetic diseases. Therefore, law permits this method only in exceptional cases, for example, if there is a high risk of serious genetic diseases or serious abnormalities are expected, which with a high degree of probability lead to stillbirth or premature birth. The Ethics Commission checks whether there are prerequisites for this.
There are various hormonal drugs, such as Clomiphene, which stimulate increased ovarian activity, or follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) which promotes egg maturation.
It is always necessary for IVF. However, with the newer IVM method (ripening in a test tube) only small doses of hormonal drugs are used. In this case, the doctor later adds hormones to the egg cell and the sperm in the Petri dish.
The procedure can lead to hyperstimulation which can be expressed in the appearance of edema, nausea and asthma.
Insemination is injecting semen into a woman’s body by the use of medical methods, for example, with a very thin catheter.
ICSI is an intracytoplasmic sperm injection. With this method, the doctor, using the thinnest glass cannula, delivers a sperm cell directly into the egg ready for fertilization.
ICSI, as the chances of success in this case are especially high. More than 30% of couples have become parents by using this method of reproductive medicine.
