Most pregnant women receive prenatal care from their local obstetrician and deliver their babies at a nearby hospital. But not all couples can conceive a child nature’s way. Couples who have sex for a year without contraception and do not achieve pregnancy are defined as infertile. So too are couples who get pregnant but, because of repeated miscarriages, have not been able to have a child. Infertility touches many lives; it affects as many as one in every six couples.
For such couples, medical assistance can be a godsend. “Assisted reproductive technology,” or ART, brings egg and sperm together in a lab. ART procedures generally involve surgically removing eggs from a woman’s ovaries, combining them with sperm in the laboratory, and returning them to the body of the egg donor or a surrogate mother. The world over, ARTs are increasingly being used to overcome all types of infertility disorders—and with great success. Some 5 million babies worldwide are born each year through some form or ART.