Infertility Care
The condition that does not result in pregnancy after a year of consistent intercourse without the use of contraception is termed as ‘infertility’. It has been proven by means of several studies conducted by various groups of scholars and scientists that about ninety percent of the couples conceive within a year of attempting to do so, while about ninety five percent of them conceive in a spa of the next two years.
The terms fertility and infertility can hardly be deemed as binary absolutes. Rather, it is possible to conceive, as has been seen in the case of forty percent of the patients who are though to be treatment failures. Therefore the term ‘reduced fertility’ is more appropriate in this respect as there are chances of conceiving within even as long as a seven year span.
The infertility rates among couples remained nearly constant for three decades before what is now termed as infertility ‘epidemic’ broke out in the 1990s. This trend has been set mainly due the postponement of childrearing till the third decade of the woman’s life, mainly due to hectic lifestyles. It has been estimated that about five million couples today suffer from infertility, which is about a percent of the total number of couples. Due to this alarming rise is the inability to bear a child, the urge to have a biological offspring has increased.
A great many couple would find themselves being put under humiliating treatment and schedule while they are on an infertility care treatment. Undergoing such a treatment involves a great deal of stress, most of it being an emotional stress resulting due to not only the monitoring on one’s sex life by the doctors, but also on gradually finding out that the man’s sperm count is low, or the woman’s womb is inhospitable. In several cases there is additional stress because of regret due to an earlier abortion because the pregnancy was unplanned and untimely.
These days, infertility care has reached new height with the use of revolutionary methods. 1978 was the year when the first test tube baby was fertilized, called Louis Brown, born in 1975. By the year 1995, thousands of test tube babies had been delivered allover the world. This was indeed deemed a path breaking move in infertility care and treatment. This is proven by the growth in fertility clinics which grew from a mere 30 in 1985 to over 300 in 1995, in the
Thought there have been attempts to standardize the code of conduct by doctors in the fertility clinics, there has nevertheless been mismanagement of cases. Patients coming for infertility care have found their security and identities compromised in many cases.