ELLE Writer Calls IVF a "Scam"

This personal narrative by Ali Margo at ELLE about her experience with the fertility industry will break your heart. She chronicles her two rounds of IVF that end with a call from the clinic telling her that all 20 of her embryos are dead. Read between the lines and you will find greed, exploitation and snake-oil. Margo paints a very unflattering picture of a billion dollar industry that she points out has a 70% failure rate. Here are some excerpts from "$47,000 Dollars Later, I Have No Baby: The IVF Scam":“You think your uterus is why you’re here, but that’s not why you’re here,” the fertility doctor said, sitting behind his desk in a crisp white lab coat, his name embroidered in bright blue thread. His smile was broad and slightly distorted. He reminded me of a car salesman.Doc proceeded to prattle on while the clock—both proverbial and literal—was ticking. We’d paid $235 for the half-hour consult. What was that, like eight bucks a minute? I just wanted to shake him and go, “Dude, can I have a baby after 40 or not?”Our doctor reassured us I still had a shot at IVF, even at 43, thanks to a new development in genetic testing known as Comprehensive Chromosome Screening (CCS). It would cost us an extra $5,500, but when you’re throwing down 30K for a designer baby, what’s an extra five thousand?“That’s a small price to pay for a human life,” my Dad had said.More than empty promises, what really drove us to keep spending was hope. Hope is like a drug that...
Source: Mary Meets Dolly - Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: IVF Source Type: blogs