Fertility

• FSH stands for follicle stimulating hormone and it stimulates the ovaries of the woman to mature an egg, but some women have low levels of FSH which means that their egg will not reach maturity.
• To fix this, FSH can be given in the form of a pill to help their eggs mature and then LH which is luteinizing hormone can be given to stimulate ovulation, which normally happens on day 14 of the menstrual cycle.
• If this doesn't work, the woman may choose to try IVF which stands for in vitro fertilization.
• In IVF, women are given FSH and LH to stimulate some of their eggs to mature, and the eggs are collected from the woman's ovaries and fertilized by sperm from the father in a laboratory.
• If a woman has a low sperm count, doctors could use a technique called intracytoplasmic sperm injection or ICSI where the sperm is injected into the egg cell with a super tiny needle.
• The fertilized eggs are placed in an incubator and left there to grow into embryos, which are tiny balls of cells.
• One or more of these embryos are taken out and inserted into the mother's uterus, and the embryo should go on to grow into a fetus.
• The pro of IVF is that it can allow infertile couples to have kids, but the con is that it doesn't always work.
• IVF can be stressful, emotionally upsetting, and physically unpleasant for women, often causing abdominal pain and vomiting.
• Another downside of IVF is that it often leads to multiple births by putting multiple embryos into the uterus in the hope of at least one of them developing.
• Some people are against IVF in general because it often results in unused embryos that are eventually destroyed even though they had the potential for human life.
• Recent advances in microscope technologies have improved the success rate of IVF and allowed us to remove single cells from the embryo for genetic tests.
• These advances have also allowed us to find out characteristics of the future baby such as their gender or their eye color, which some people fear could lead to designer babies where we pick the ones that we like most.