My friend Kerry was recently featured with her family in the NYT. (Her blog about her IVF w/ ICSI, twin boys and NICU stay can be found here: ourstorkgotlost.com
The topic of the NYT article was on “The Gift of Life and its Price” It had to do with the high cost of twin+ pregnancies and how the number of premature births has increased 36% over the last 25 years. That increase is due at least in part to fertility treatments. 60% of twins are born prematurely.
My friend’s Kerry’s beautiful boys Max and Wes were born about 10 weeks premature at around 3lbs and had 43 day and 51 day NICU stays at a cost of $1.2 million.
Kerry and Jeff, like Ben and I, have ONE SHOT for IVF. They spent 23% of their annual income trying to have a baby, so when the choice was given to them “put back one or two high quality blasts” they of COURSE chose 2 to maximize their shots of pregnancy.
The thing is most medical organizations, including the CDC and Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) suggest putting back only one embryo because of the increased risk of multiple pregnancies.
Yet most insurance companies don’t cover IVF. It’s a “luxury” to have a child, I guess. Well guess what. I have a child and am still willing to pay about $25,000 to have a second. We did put back one blast, but only because we had high qualities blasts to freeze. When we do our FET (it costs another $5000 or so), we’ll put back two. If I had my options, I’d put back one, one, one, one, one, one, one. That whole procedure would cost $60,000 for the IVF and all resulting frozen transfers. If that whole process were covered 2x (and most people are lucky to have 1-2 blasts make it to freeze), I bet the number of twin pregnancies due to IVF would go WAY down.
Unfortunately, so much of this is about cost.
My laprascopic surgery to remove endometriosos (a covered expense) cost more than $30,000. I got it in the hopes it would improve my chances to conceive. The pain from it can also be treated with birth control pills (though not when TTC, obviously.) My insurance company could have paid for 1 IVF for less than the cost of the surgery.
Too bad nothing about our medical care system makes sense.
This is the March of Dimes Prematurity Awareness month. IMO, the quickest way to reduce premature births is to do all we can do to reduce multiples. My first baby was in the NICU for 4 days. It was 4 days of hell, and I don’t know how those families survive extended NICU stays, let alone with young kids at home. IMO, the best way to ease that suffering is to cover the MUCH cheaper cost of IF. Don’t even get me started on what that would do to the mental health costs of IF patients! To me it’s all dollars and sense.
You can give money to the March of Dimes to help premature babies here:
https://www.marchofdimes.com/howtohelp/donate_online.asp
You can take action with the advice of RESOLVE’s (national infertility association) tips to improving IF coverage here (call your representatives and senators, write to your company’s HR department demanding reasonable IF coverage, etc):
http://www.resolve.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ta_home
You can see the letter I wrote to our insurance company here:
https://seekingsibling.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/why-i-think-insurance-should-cover-infertility/
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