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IVF over 40

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Susan Tollefsen, IVF Mother at 57 » 

Within the IVF culture there lies a two-tiered system, a kind of class system if you like.

Whilst everyone is barrelled together under the substantial umbrella of assisted reproductive techniques there are two very distinctive groups - the Have-Maybes and the Have-Probably-Nots. And the problem is, until you sign up and get all the info you don't know which of these you will likely belong to.

IVF success rates, attached to the various clinics, are generalized and tend to be based on the rates for the 25-35 year groups. This is where wonderful statistics like 48% come in. Until you realize you're nowhere near the age group being touted.

Then you become like the child looking down the exam result charts for your name, moving through the high marks and distinctions and your heart sinks as you move lower and lower and eventually find yourself at the bottom.

Even the 40 and over stats can look slightly encouraging, maybe a ten percent success rate and you think that's OK. But ask for a break-down, say the age 42 rate and it'll be six percent then after that it dwindles to about one by 45.

And those statistics are for pregnancies, not live births and in the over 40's there is an increasing discrepancy with the higher rate of miscarriage.

Then, if you haven't already slit your wrists, you have a meeting with a stony-faced doctor who does little to encourage you and practically tries to discourage you from going ahead with it. But what about my one percent chance? you scream. It's better than nothing, surely we can try.

This is where you think, when does hope, even if it's a flicker, surrender to hopelessness? I'll always remember a work colleague, a single woman in her fifties, who'd yet to meet her mate and her motto was, "Where there's life there's hope."

And she's absolutely right. Did Adriana Iliescu, the Romanian 66-year old mother of a baby girl give up? Never. There are ways to still have a baby, more difficult in Australia with the egg donor laws but a lot more common in the US where eggs are available approaching the way sperm is. You have to be prepared to try whatever it takes.

Even worse, though, than the lack of encouragement and hope surrounding IVF in your forties is the attitude that somehow it's all your fault, that you were greedy and wanted a career instead of children or something. While for a small percentage of women delaying having a child was a deliberate decision (and let's face it, until recently nobody knew what problems this would create), for many it wasn't. It was simply due to not finding a mate or one who wanted children in the near future.

Unfortunately by the time these women found someone who had evolved to the Homo Sapien stage and wanted to commit to them and having a family, they were approaching or in their forties.

Just as images of female celebrities having children in their mid forties has done nothing to help the situation, nor have the images of people like Rod Stewart who manages to combine paunch and raunch, acting all virile with a thirty something wife and having a baby when he's sixty two.

Why rush, men say, when you can have the kid at sixty two and have the young glamorous wife to boot? The problem, of course, which they will find out in twenty years or so is unless you've already been a sex symbol/pop star and are currently a billionaire to any young fertility goddess you will simply be a disgusting paunchy old man.

Still, where there's life there's hope.

Jodi Panayotov