Choosing Your Fertility Clinic

Success rates must be considered carefully when choosing an I.V.F. clinic.

DR. SMITH: Well you know measuring a program’s success rates is a bit tricky. Many programs will report statistics for pregnancy rates. But that can be a bit of a smoking mirrors. Not everybody who becomes pregnant will necessarily deliver at term. And also you should take into consideration that pregnancy in a sense is an all or none event in that you are either pregnant or you are not. But it doesn’t take into consideration that you may be pregnant with twins or triplets or quadruplets. So programs that are trying to boost their pregnancy rate may be transferring more than the expected number of embryos to try to generate a higher pregnancy rate. So you have to be a bit careful. The best way to evaluate a program actually, oddly enough is to go to the CDC web site and look to see what their success rates are for their donor egg program. You see when we use donated eggs, all the conditions are optimized. So it is a level playing field. It doesn’t have anything to do with the number of embryos that you are transferring or whether you deal specifically with more difficult cases or not, or whether you have an older patient population. All those things are taken out of the equation. What you are looking at is the situation when things are optimized. So when all things are going great, just how well can that program do? And I am happy to say that our success rate here in using donated eggs is very, very high. One of the highest in the country.