I’ve been pregnant ten times (depending on how you count). One ectopic pregnancy that required two shots of methotrexate to terminate. A second ectopic pregnancy (resolved naturally but further scarred my fallopian tube). A very early undiagnosed miscarriage. After those three we turned to IVF. My IVF baby boy. A blighted ovum. A very early miscarriage. My anencephaly pregnancy, terminated at 17 weeks. Two very, very early miscarriages. My omphalocele miscarriage, D&C at 13 weeks.
That’s not a great record. And, unfortunately, the fact that I had so much trouble getting pregnant and that I had so many miscarriages was probably just an indicator I was fucked. So no surprise that I had two pregnancies marred by very rare birth defects.
Recurrent pregnancy loss is an indicator for increased risk of birth defects:
IVF just makes it worse. Women who have IVF are more likely to have pregnancies with birth defects. Most of that is probably because of the population of women doing IVF (old, infertile), but the process itself probably plays some (small, hopefully) part.
This article suggests that there is an increase in birth defects when IVF is used, but it’s almost entirely (but not exclusively?) explained by “maternal factors” (i.e. age):
For some things (including neural tube defects and omphalocele), there was a three-fold increase in incidence when fertility treatments are used.
This article suggests that there is an increase in birth defects when ICSI is used with IVF:
Fetuses with Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome (what we were worried about) were more likely to have been from assisted reproduction than were babies with isolated ompaloceles:
What does one do with this information? Well, of course, you hope that if you do IVF you are one of the vast majority of people who do not have any issues. I suspect my issues had less to do with the process of IVF (although it couldn’t have helped) and more to do with genetic issues that made me infertile in the first place.
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