The financial side of fertility treatment is fraught for many patients, and figuring out how to fund your care is challenging. Often, the last thing you want to think about are the intricacies and bureaucracies of insurance, but understanding your rights and your options can make a huge difference as you move forward. To help you get a clear picture of what you need and can expect from your insurance provider, we have put together this clear guide. Asking the right questions is the first step towards getting the right answers.
All of us at SCRC are committed to education. Providing access to cutting edge research, dispelling common myths about fertility, and helping people understand how fertility treatment might be able to help them: it’s all part of our mission, and it’s important work. There’s a lot of information out there about fertility. Some of it’s great, some of it’s incomplete or outdated, and some of it is actually full of inaccuracies and misunderstandings. Sorting through it all to find out what you need to know can be a real challenge.
In our many years of speaking with and treating patients, there are some questions that our fertility doctors hear time and time again. Today, we’ll take a look at some of these queries and offer some straightforward answers.
Dealing with the emotional fallout of infertility is hard at any time of the year, but there is one date on the calendar which can be particularly difficult. For anyone who is struggling to have the baby they want so badly, Mother’s Day can feel like a slap in the face. Not only is it a holiday that specifically excludes women without children, it’s also another reminder that time is passing while you are still waiting for your baby.
Late last year, famous TV uncle John Stamos was excited to announce that he and his then fiancée, Caitlin McHugh, are expecting their first child. At 54, Stamos falls on the older side of the scale for a new dad. He’s certainly not alone. Both men and women are delaying parenthood, with the average age of first time parents climbing all the time. Currently, in almost 10% of all U.S. births, the father is over the age of 40, a percentage which has more than doubled since 1973 when that number was only 4.1%. Fathers over 50 are still outliers, however, accounting for a little less than 1%. The links between maternal age and fertility have been deeply studied and these findings get a lot of media coverage, but are there risks that potential older fathers should be aware of?
Egg freezing has become an important part of today’s fertility conversations. New techniques and technologies in cryopreservation have made this a viable option for many young women who know that they want to have children, but are not ready to be pregnant right now.
Public opinion still sees infertility as primarily a woman’s issue. When fertility treatments are covered in the media, the articles and features you see are almost always written by and directed at women. The stories you hear through the grapevine are usually from a woman’s point of view. If men are mentioned in relation to infertility at all, it is often as an afterthought.
When you’ve decided to reach out for help with your fertility, you have a huge choice ahead of you. Usually, it’s already taken a lot of soul searching, deep conversations, and painstaking research to get to this point, and now all of your hopes seem to hang on this one decision: choosing the right fertility clinic.
Egg donation is a beautiful and rewarding journey. The egg donors we have worked with describe the experience of giving the gift of a child to another human being as one of the most precious experiences of their lives. One of our egg donors describes her experience below.
Infertility is such a difficult thing to go through. Disappointment, grief, frustration, fear: by the time you seek expert advice, your emotions have probably already been through the wringer. Somehow, you summoned the courage to ask for help, submit to testing, and undergo treatment, but it’s not working. When all of this emotion and effort is met with more disappointment, where do you turn next?
In the quest to get pregnant and bring home a healthy baby, many infertility patients are eager to explore every option that might give them an edge. Complimentary treatments and therapies such as massage, nutritional counselling and supplements, chiropractic adjustments and elements of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) are often suggested as additions to conventional medical and surgical fertility treatments like IUI and IVF. Acupuncture in particular is commonly recommended, but does it work and should you consider trying it?
