As I mentioned some time ago, my wife became pregnant through IVF, or in-vitro fertilization. For us, pregnancy wasn’t the easy task that it is for some people—in fact, it’s been quite likely the most challenging part of my life so far—and carried with it a slew of moral and emotional challenges. But hopefully my burden can be your gain, and my experiences can shed some insight on the process for some of you out there. So in this post, I’m going to describe the process and challenges we went through. This is for any man (or woman, really) who’s having fertility problems and considering IVF.
A quick warning before we begin: It’s going to get a bit religious. And while I occasionally dip my toes in the waters of religion on this site (because being a capable person requires having your heart in the right place) my goal isn’t to proselytize; I’ll leave that to people much smarter than I. No, my goal is just to make guys happier and more successful. But it’s kind of hard, when talking about such a heavy topic as this, to divorce my beliefs from the experience and the advice. I hope that doesn’t prevent those of you seeking advice to turn away. I guess I suggest you just absorb the information that applies to you, and leave the rest, much like the salad bar at Golden Corral, but without as much risk of contracting communicable diseases.
One other warning: Keep in mind that I’m by no means an expert on some of things we’ll discuss. It was a real struggle for me to figure out some of this information. Not only did my work schedule, combined with hospital COVID restrictions, mean that I didn’t get many opportunities to talk with the doctor, we went through this whole process in Korea, and even when Korean doctors can speak English (they’re all supposed to be able to, but …) they’re often not the best at communicating with expats. Hell, my wife once went in for a sudden appendectomy, and the doctor and staff pretty much pretended I didn’t even exist. I’m getting off topic. My point is, the information presented in this post is information that I kind of had to decode through my own research, and so some of it may not be totally correct. Try your best to double-verify anything you read here, please. And that being said, if you find the information either accurate or inaccurate, feel free to leave a comment either validating or refuting it; I’m sure other readers will find it helpful.
Okay, let’s get started.
The Beginning
So let’s start where the difficulties all began. My wife and I had been trying to conceive for almost a year but with no luck. So we went to a specialist and discovered I had bad sperm morphology. Oh—I forgot to warn you about this, too: you’re going to have to hear about my sperm. There’s going to be more talking about sperm than the Clinton impeachment hearings, and if you get that joke, then you’re probably the same age as I am.
Now this was a puzzle for me. First of all, what’s exactly meant by “bad sperm morphology?” Keep in mind this isn’t the same as low sperm count. I had enough sperm, but it was just … messed up, I guess. But as near as I can tell, either the tails weren’t good for propelling the boys, or the heads weren’t shaped in a way as to help them penetrate (gigitty) the egg. I think the percentage of “good” sperm was about 1-2 percent, which meant it wasn’t impossible, just very, very low. I think a typical rate is something like 14 percent, but I’ve heard conflicting information on that, so I suggest researching it yourself, if you’re interested.
So what to do? Well, had I been in my twenties, we could have just bided our time (bid our time?) but because I’m a complete dumbass who bought into the B.S. that I should follow my dreams, that I could be whatever I wanted, and that I was a special snowflake destined for greatness because Mr. Rogers told me so, I spent all those valuable child-rearing years putzing around when I should have been building a family. As it was, my wife was already at the age when a pregnancy would be considered “high risk.” We’ll talk about this a little more later, but in short, that means there are more chances for miscarriages, birth defects, and the like. So we didn’t exactly have time to mess around.
So here’s my first bit of advice to you: If you even think you might want to have kids someday, don’t wait—get started, even if it means you’ll have to put your dreams of becoming the world’s best Diversity and Equity Manager of Starbuck’s Corporate on hold for the moment. (For more thoughts on this, you can read this article HERE.) You might have heard that women have a “biological clock,” and that, if they wait too long, they miss having the opportunity to have children forever. It might have led you to think that this is a problem unique to women, but it’s not. Not entirely. Sure, theoretically men can have kids up until the time their wangers look like drought-ridden green beans, puffing out clouds of dust, but in reality, as time passes, the quality of your sperm can decrease. Notice I said can. I hope yours doesn’t. Was that my issue? I don’t know. We’ll talk about that in a second. But even if your sperm remains grade-A quality until the day you die, you also have to figure that there aren’t a whole lot of women out there, with functional wombs, that are champing at the bit to get themselves filled up with geriatric genitalia … despite what porn might lead you to believe.
So that was my problem. Bad sperm, and not much time to do anything about it. I could have avoided, or at least substantially lessened, the problem had I gotten married earlier, but seeing as how my time machine got broken when I tried to go back and assassinate Hitler, I had to make do.
One potential solution was IVF: in-vitro fertilization. However, I had some ethical qualms about this. Again, I’ll get into more details about this later. Spoiler: I did end up going this route, and I have a wealth of information to share about both the process and ethics, so stay tuned. In any case, I was hesitant. “IVF hesitant,” if you will. So I decided to try to fix my bad sperm.
First of all, understand that this whole thing was a mystery to me. No one else in my family has suffered from fertility problems (I have 7 nieces and nephews—combined, not 7 of each). Any doctors I sought advice from always told me the same things: exercise, and abstain from drugs, which of course, I already did. So I threw everything and the kitchen sink at the problem: I tried abstaining from processed sugar, dairy products, and BPAs. I began exercising every day of the week and doing yoga afterwards, then when that didn’t work, reducing my exercising. I switched from boxer briefs to boxers. I tried oriental medicine. I tried wearing a mask outside (this was before the ‘rona) to filter out chemicals in the air. I tried standing while working on my computer (I thought sitting all day might have a negative effect on my sperm). I tried vitamins of all varieties. Just about everything you can imagine. No luck.
So our next step was to try artificial insemination. That’s when I’d go to the hospital, put my baby batter into a cup, and then they’d somehow put it into my wife. I didn’t see how they did it, but I picture they did so via some crazy-looking gun-like contraption that looks like a ray gun from a 1950s sci-fi movie. In any case, if you’re like me, you’re wondering how that is supposed to get around the issue of bad sperm morphology. Well, I’m still not totally sure, but as I understand it, it helps improve the chances of fertilization by providing a “shortcut” to the sperm so that any potential good sperm cells have less chance to get … I don’t know, lost or stuck in the vagina or something like that. Who knows. Or maybe the doctor was just trying to get our money. In any case, my wife went in for quite a few of these sessions. I want to say about four or so. Now, this process was inconvenient enough for me: I had to take time off from work. But it was even more difficult for her, because, while I just had to go in and punish the one-eyed yogurt slinger for five minutes … okay one minute, she had to take all kinds of medicine and hormones designed to make her produce eggs, and then, on top of it all, get a 1950s mad-scientist sperm cannon rammed into her vagina. Part of that last description might be colored slightly by my imagination—anyway, it wasn’t a walk in the park for her, that’s for sure.
By the way, as a side note, it was at this point I realized just how much my wife loved me. What I haven’t mentioned until this point was the fact that she was kind of neutral when it came to having kids. Based on conversations we’d had, I got the impression that she would have been totally content to live out our married life without children. And yet here she was, going through all of this, without so much as a complaint. It made that time she stayed mad at me for an entire weekend because I forgot to put down the toilet seat, seem like a triviality.
Anyway, all sentimentality aside, suffice it to say that the artificial insemination didn’t do much. By this time, the nurses at the clinic were becoming more familiar with my sperm than my own wife. I got comfortable enough with the situation so as to be able to hand off the vial to them and say things like, “Ahh, white gold!” or wave at it and say, “Good luck, gentlemen! Bon voyage, and don’t forget to take that hard left-hand turn at the fallopian tubes!” I don’t think the nurses understood the joke, but they smiled patronizingly. But we had given it the old college try, and subsequently old college failed. And months before that, I would have said that would be the end of it. I was morally opposed to any other methods of conceiving, and so either we’d have to hope for a miracle baby during the last dwindling years of our fertility, or live out the rest of our lives with just each other, eventually fading from the pages of history. Oh—you might be wondering about adoption. Well, yes, that was indeed a choice as well, but for whatever reason, I just felt really spurred to have a child through pregnancy. (Well, not me being pregnant … you know what I mean.) Does that make me a hypocrite or whatever? Maybe. You can be the judge of that. My job here is just to give you advice about conceiving children.
In any case, artificial insemination seemed to have failed, but we weren’t done yet. No sir, not by a long shot.
But before we move on to part two, first a quick note on bad sperm morphology. You might wondering if bad sperm can lead to birth defects. Well, according to Heidi Murkoff’s book, What to Expect When you’re Expecting, no one is really quite sure. Some sources I’ve looked at have said there’s no connection, others have suggested that there might be. My big worry was that our baby might have Down’s Syndrome. You see, when a woman passes around 40 years of age, the chance of this increases, and it seems to me that doctors aren’t really sure why. Some think it’s due to the mother, but some think it might have to do with the father’s sperm, since older women are more likely to have older husbands. The bottom line is, as I said, no one’s really sure. Anyway, our baby is well into the 2nd trimester and tests have shown that she’s free of genetic abnormalities. I’ll talk about those tests a bit later, too—that was scary—but my guess about this is as good as yours. Just another reason to not wait too long before you have kids. I mean, the odds are still greatly in your favor that your child will be complication-free even when you’re in your 40s, with sperm that look like tailed raisins, but at the same time, the odds are also just a little bit less in your favor, if you know what I mean.
In-vitro Fertilization
Okay, here’s where things get a bit dicey. Now, I’m not here to judge anyone … Wait, I judge people all the time, don’t I? But that’s because they’re out of shape, wear stupid clothes, and make bad decisions. Anyway, I’m not here to talk ethics, but I’m going to talk about mine a bit and you can agree or disagree as you see fit. But I think the information might be helpful to some. You see, my big hang-up with in-vitro fertilization was this:
… Wait a second, before we get into this, let’s make sure we’re all clear on what in-vitro fertilization is.
In-vitro fertilization, also known as IVF, also known as making test-tube babies (as my wife called it) is when the doctor takes sperm from the husband, and eggs from the mother, and sort of manually unites them. I think there are different methods: In some (as I understand it) they just put them in a petri dish and hope the sperm and egg meet like pimply teenagers at an awkward high school dance, but in some other methods, they actually sort of inject the sperm into the egg, while, I like to think, cackling manically like mad scientists.
So what made me balk at this was the fact that, as I understood it, the mad scientist—I mean “doctor”—would fertilize several eggs, use one of them to put in the mother, then throw the others away like a piece of gubernatorial campaign junk mail. And, while some people smarter than I might disagree, to me that might as well be flushing my kids down the toilet. Well, my wife (did I mention how patient, tolerant, and hard-working she was through this whole process?) did some research, and found that that’s not totally true.
Oh, at this juncture I should point out something else I did that was kind of foolish, but turned out okay in the long run (you might not have the same luck!): I married a woman whose ethics didn’t totally match my own. Now, here you have to balance things. No one is perfect, and it’s possible I could have married a woman who shared my beliefs, but was a total head case, which would have been worse than marrying a woman who didn’t share my beliefs, but was tolerant and loving enough to accept them anyway. So you kind of have to gauge these things carefully. But there were some times when I struggled to explain my views to my wife. So when you’re considering spending the rest of your life with a woman, think about how she might react if you find yourself in situations like mine, if her reaction fits with your ethics or not, and if not, how you’ll handle any differences in viewpoint.
Okay, so here’s how we found out the IVF process actually works. (At least, by my understanding. Again, please double check with your own research!) As I said, they do try to make several embryos. At this point, the parents can choose to have only one placed into the mother, or several of them. If only one is chosen, the rest can actually be frozen and utilized at a later date. … Or you can just throw them away like gubernatorial campaign junk mail.
But let’s back up for a second. First, note that just because a doctor fertilizes an egg (hopefully with your sperm, and not someone else’s) it doesn’t mean that the zygote will become a full-on baby. Some of them just sort of “fizzle out,” as I understand it: the cells fail to develop into baby parts and they’ll never become actual babies. Others, when put into the mother, fail to implant. So keep that in mind. We’ll come back to this later.
Now with that being said, if a couple decides to get multiple embryos put inside the mother at once, that means there’s a chance that all of them could become babies, and she might have twins or triplets. However, with older women, like my wife, there’s usually not a chance that will happen, so doctors sometimes prefer to insert multiple embryos in this case.
On the other hand, if you end up putting your babies on ice, you have to pay a storage fee per embryo. There is a small chance that, when they’re defrosted, the little guys won’t survive the process, so you have to take that in consideration too, but we had one frozen, then implanted a few months later, and it survived the thawing process just fine. There is a fee you’ll have to continue to pay as long as the embryos are frozen. I’m not sure what the fee is in your country, so you’ll have to research that on your own. I know in Korea, you can only keep embryos frozen for up to 3 years, but I believe in America you can actually do it for much longer … maybe even forever? … and you can even have them adopted by other parents, who’ll take on the pregnancy process themselves. This latter item is known as embryo adoption. If you’re interested in this, I believe there’s an organization called “Nightlight Christian Adoptions” that carries it out. I think they also do a lot of other work when it comes to adoptions, so if this is a cause that sparks your interest, check them out.
Alright, back to my wife and I. So we found a fertility clinic with a good reputation, but that was about an hour or so drive away. We figured “go hard or go home,” though, right? So I figured we’d go there, make some mad scientist babies, slip ‘em into my wife, and bada-bing, bada-bang, instant family, right? Well it wasn’t that easy.
One problem that ended up being on my mind was: What if we end up with too many embryos? Like, say we end up with eight? What then? We can’t raise eight kids. I don’t want to throw them away. And unlike America, we can’t put them up for adoption. And, while I have read accounts of this happening, for us it turned out that it wasn’t an issue. (For us–your experience could produce many more embryos, so keep that in mind.) As I said earlier, not every embryo ends up surviving. We did the process, and I think my wife said around eight (or was it 11?) eggs got extracted when she went in. (The doctors gave her some medicine that caused her to super-ovulate, basically.) So all those fertilized eggs, but in the end, only one actually ended up surviving, and it was of poor quality (this is the one we had frozen). And that was kind of heartbreaking for me. Such a waste. But we had gone this far, so it was no time for regrets. Sunken-cost fallacy? Maybe. But this was no time to have second thoughts. So we tried it again.
Keep in mind the time and effort this was taking. At this time I had started my new job, and it was worrisome trying to coordinate these visits to the fertility clinic with my work. It was even more time-consuming for my wife, who used up all her personal days at work traveling to this clinic in a neighboring city. I had no idea it would be this time intensive.
I can’t exactly remember the number of eggs we ended up getting on the second attempt. Maybe eight? Why does that number keep coming into my head? I think it was 11 on one try and eight on the other. Can’t remember. Anyway, the second try only produced two embryos, and those were also of poor quality. So we were left with a total of three.
Note: I want to repeat this: while we only ended up with 3 poor-quality embryos, other people’s results could be quite different. I’ve read accounts of people who end up with a pretty big handful of viable embryos on the first try, so this is also something you need to think about. So while my worrying ending up being for nothing, yours might not be. If having a bunch of extra embryos sitting around, and what to do with them, is an issue for you, you might need to think carefully about if IVF is right for you or not.
So let’s take a minute and break this all down a bit. First of all, the time investment. I think I ended up having to make about two trips to the hospital. My wife had to make quite a lot more, since she had to do all the consultations with the doctor regarding the hormones she had to take, egg extraction, and so on. So that’s something for you to keep in mind.
Now let’s talk about those embryos. I said earlier they were of poor quality or were “low grade.” First of all, one of my concerns about this whole process was what, exactly, doctors do with the embryos if they’re not up to snuff. I thought maybe they’d just throw them away like … well, you know. And I don’t know, maybe some clinics do, but ours didn’t. They used them. From my understanding, they only discard them if there’s no possibility that they’ll survive and develop. As I said earlier, from my understanding (those magic words), the ones that were discarded just stopped growing. Or maybe they continued, but the cells weren’t developing, so there was never a chance they’d become babies. Keep in mind, though, that I’m not an expert, and this was all information I sifted out in a country where I wasn’t a fluent speaker of the language, and where people tend to have a habit of keeping foreigners in the dark about important things anyway, so I encourage you to do your own research on this if it’s a concern.
But what, exactly does that mean if the embryos are of low quality? Basically, it just means that there’s less of a chance they’ll survive. As I understand it, it doesn’t have any bearing on the likelihood your baby will end up coming out as some kind of shrieking, three-eyed mutant that scrambles up and out the chimney the moment it’s born, then takes to the woods where it lives out its days as a misunderstood beast surviving off raw deer it catches with its bare hands. So don’t worry about that part.
Anyway, three embryos, one womb. In the end, only one of them made it, but she had made it, and we got the good news that my wife was officially pregnant.
The NIPT Test
We weren’t out of the woods yet, though. I still had concerns our baby might end up with Down’s Syndrome. As I said earlier, this can be an issue for parents of our age. Granted, it’s still a very small chance, but of course I’m the person who, when it rains, worries about the chance of getting struck by lightning.
Now, I had made up my mind that even if I knew the baby had Down’s Syndrome, I was going to make that baby mine, and raise her (or him—we didn’t know at the time) to be the best Down’s Syndrome kid she could be. I mean, did you ever see that movie The Peanut Butter Falcon? That kid was cool. But I wasn’t so sure my wife was on board.
And again, let me stress the value of marrying someone whose value system aligns with yours. If you’re a younger guy in your twenties, physical attraction is probably pretty high on your list of priorities in a mate. And that’s not totally unwarranted. I mean, let’s be blunt, if you have to look at someone you find physically unattractive every day, it’s going to cause your patience to wear thin. But on the other hand, let me tell you, sex becomes a lot less important as you get older. I know that sounds horrifying to you, but trust me, you won’t miss it once higher priorities—like family building—kick in. So keep this in mind when you have to choose between someone who’s hot, and someone who shares you code of ethics. Fortunately, as I said, my wife is special.
Anyway, my mom used to tell me of how, when I was an unborn baby, the doctor wanted her to have an amniocentesis. This is when they stick a needle in the mother and withdraw some of the amniotic fluid in the womb and test it to find some things out about the baby, like if it has Down’s Syndrome. And oh, there’s a small chance that, uh … well, that the doctor will accidentally stab and kill the baby with the needle, but that sort of thing never happens, haha! In all seriousness, there’s a very, very small chance of that, but it’s there. In any case, my mom always told me that she refused the test because even if I did have Down’s Syndrome, she’d still have me. … And I’ll leave it up to you to decide what the results of that test were.
Well, nowadays instead of an amniocentesis, they have something called a NIPT test, which, long story short, does most of the same things, but doesn’t have the stabby-stabby part. The doctor said this NIPT test was the next step. … And it was expensive! So I thought about this, and about what my mother said, and I ran it by my wife. I said, “You know, why don’t we just skip the test? I mean, even if it does have Down’s Syndrome …” and to my surprise, my wife agreed with me. That was a big relief to know she was on the same wavelength as I.
At this point, let me shift gears for a second. During this whole process, worries about this sort of thing were on my mind. I found myself contemplating worst-case scenarios and what I’d do if they came about. And sometimes I thought that maybe it would have just been better to not try to have a child at all. … But every time I came to the same conclusion: There can be no success without taking risks. We can live our lives in our houses (assuming we somehow have a magical system of making money this way) without every stepping foot outside and meeting anyone, eventually passing away in comfort, being, as I said earlier, lost to the mists of time. Or we can step outside the house, take risks, maybe get in fights and get hurt, but ultimately forge ourselves a destiny. And so I continued on my path, not knowing what challenges I’d encounter or how I’d deal with them, but knowing that the only way to go was straight ahead.
Anyway, a few nights before we got the test results, I was overcome with terror. First of all, the thought that I might end up having to spend the rest of my life taking care of a special-needs human hit me hard. But to my credit, I’m resolute, so I steeled myself to be ready to take on the task if that was indeed, what I was called to do. But also there were comments from my wife that made me think that maybe she wasn’t on the same page as I after all. And I wondered if the biggest threat to our child might actually be my own wife. Well, the thoughts she verbalized actually seemed to go back and forth on the issue during those days, and I think in the end, she was as nervous as I was, and trying to come to terms with it all, but just didn’t want to show it. In any case, I only got a few hours of sleep for those nights, and it was during that time that I realized what true fear was. And let me tell you, whatever you’re going through: difficulty finding a job, girl troubles, it’s trivial compared to what could be. And even in my case, things could have been worse. So keep things in perspective, always.
Well, the day of the test finally came, and we got the results: a healthy little girl.
Further Tests
We had a few more tests. There was one called a neural tube defect test, which basically tested for spina bifida, a cleft palette, and some kind of disorder where the head doesn’t fully develop. And just the other day my wife went in for another ultrasound to make sure the heart, brain, kidneys, etc., are all fine and of course they were. To quote my wife after the test results, “She’s perfect,” to which I replied, “So she takes after her mother, then.” … I thought I’d score some points for that bit of quick thinking, but it kind of went unheard, I think. Oh well.
The Religious Part
As I’ve said, if religion isn’t your scene, feel free to skip this part, but if it is, or if you’re religion-curious, maybe stick around for the encore.
Anyway, through this whole process I really learned to trust more fully in God. Now, a bit of a confession: I’m a fairly logical person, but at times, I can be weirdly superstitious. (And some people would claim that “superstitious” and “religious” are redundant, nyuck, nyuck, nyuck, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss.) Specifically, I’ve always held by the belief that the universe loves irony, and that the moment you invest in something is the moment you jinx it to failure. Post on Facebook that you’re looking forward to your plane trip home? That plane’ll crash into the sea, never to be found again. Tell your friends you knocked your algebra test out of the park? You’ll wind up with an F. So the trick, I’ve always thought, is to always expect the worst.
Furthermore, I had never been a big believer in the power of prayer. I thought it was useful as a means of showing devotion, but as far as praying for something you want? Nah. I mean, I remember, when I was younger, fervently praying the rosary for my sister’s husband, who was dying of brain cancer, and you can guess how well that turned out. So I figured if praying didn’t work then, why would it work for anything else? If anything, it almost seemed like praying caused me to get the opposite of what I asked for. What the hell? I didn’t understand at the time, though, that when we pray, we don’t necessarily get what we want—we get what we need. A convenient excuse, skeptics might say, and small consolation for those who have undergone hardship, but I guess that’s an argument for another time and place.
In any case, I suddenly realized that, for all these years, my superstition had been paying tribute to some nebulous force of entropy that was impartial at best, and cruel at worst, when my faith dictated that I should have instead been trusting in God. And so, in an act of faith, I decided to spit in the face of superstition and irony, and put my trust where it belonged. And so I began praying again. There were times when I wanted to go back to my old habits—for example, I’ve been keeping a little diary of the days of my wife’s pregnancy, and there were times when I thought, “Surely, by doing this, I’m dooming myself to tragedy—how ironic would it be for me to do this work, only to have it be for nothing in the end?” and at those moments I thought of the story of when Jesus encouraged Peter to walk on the water and Peter, due to his lack of faith, began to sink. And so I persisted. And so now here I sit, a more faithful and rational man.
Conclusion
Well, there we go. I’m exhausted after writing this, but I like to think it has a wide variety of helpful information for anyone who’s having trouble conceiving a baby and, while not all of it might apply to your situation (if you are, indeed, experiencing trouble having children) I hope you managed to find a few bits of information that can help guide your choices. Best wishes.