What are pros and cons of undergoing IVF treatment?

When a patient or a couple consider IVF, clearly what goes through their mind is what are the pros, what are the cons? Well, people think that the pros are fairly obvious, and that is we're going to get a baby at the end of it, but what is really important is to understand the realism behind IVF. It's part of the reproductive process. We're using a medical procedure to help a patient or a couple trying to do something that other people seem to be doing quite naturally and very easily. The IVF process itself is actually quite complicated. It's quite stressful. It's a bit of a roller coaster, and even if they succeed and they have a baby, we should never lose sight of the fact that there still may need to be support for that couple. The couple of may themselves need some extra special help. In fact, there are charities out there, one of them called ACeBabes, that actually specifically helps couples who've had babies from IVF. So although the positivity is there, we have to recognise there are also some issues. But even in the most successful IVF clinics in the world, not all patients will have a baby on their first cycle. So going through IVF, the positive thought is we're going to get a baby at the end of it, can turn very quickly into a negative emotion, because it hasn't happened. Being able to deal with that, I think, is very important to clinics. Being able to support the couples going through that is very important. That is why counselling, independent counselling is very much a part of the IVF process, or it should be and it certainly is in CARE Fertility. The negative side, as I say is obviously, it's a bit of a downer if it doesn't work, and it can be a very big issue for couples, especially because in a lot of circumstances it's a very expensive process if the government isn't paying and funding for the cycle, and then has to be started all over again. It's a process that involves quite often a lot of gathering of information. One thinks we're going to go through the IVF process and maybe it'll happen or it doesn't happen. What they don't think is new information comes out of that very IVF process. Situations that maybe not even the medical practitioners thought would exist at that moment in time. For example, fertilisation didn't occur when nobody ever realised, expected it would be a problem, or embryo quality is poor, or egg quality is poor. None of that was foreseen beforehand. So it really is quite an emotional topsy-turvy medical procedure, which doesn't guarantee outcome. So there are many stress-related factors that we have to balance. In the one side of it, it's very positive because there's something there we can do. In many cases now, and in fact, in most groups of patients, the majority of cases end up with a baby. But the flip side is others don't. And so there is a great balance and there a great realism that has to come into any IVF cycle.