Stopping IVF. It was something I grappled with for quite a while.

The miscarriages had been difficult to take, but I felt like I could handle them quite well. It was only when we had that one pregnancy that did not end in a miscarriage on it’s own that I began to question what we were doing… I certainly never wanted us to be in the position again where we had to decide whether or not to continue on with a pregnancy.

For me personally, having the decision taken out of my own hands was much easier to deal with emotionally than being told that our baby had a very limited chance of survival, and that my own life could soon be in danger, so the best course of action was to terminate the pregnancy before it got to that point.

I had originally wanted to start doing IVF because we could test our embryos genetically prior to transferring them… we’d never had any trouble falling pregnant, so our fertility Dr (who was also our OB) thought at that time that we had a really good chance at a successful outcome with IVF.

Once we started doing all the routine tests for IVF though, we found out that I have low AMH (low egg count) which meant it would be hard to get many eggs from each retrieval. Our Dr at the time questioned whether we really wanted to try going down the IVF path given that we might not end up with any embryos to test at all, let alone find one that was genetically balanced.

We thought we would give it a crack anyway, and ended up doing 5 retrievals. We would only get a couple of eggs each time, resulting in one or two embryos to test. Across those 5 retrievals we ended up with 2 embryos that came back as genetically balanced.

We went on to transfer those two embryos but unfortunately neither of them successfully transferred.

After speaking to my Dr we learned that even the process of taking a biopsy to test the embryos can damage them, which is so disheartening, given it is so hard to even get an embryo in the first place.

We thought about whether or not to continue doing IVf or to go back to trying naturally.

IVF seemed fairly pointless, if our “good” embryos were only going to end up being damaged anyway. It felt like a giant waste of time and money. Plus, it was a particularly stressful time to be dong IVF with all the COVID restrictions and what felt like a thousand different reasons your cycle could be cancelled. It really felt like IVF and COVID restrictions together were taking over our lives and becoming an unnecessary stress, which I also felt was taking away from time we could be focussing on the family we already had.

I was feeling really torn ethically as to whether or not we should try to naturally have another child. 

I turned to my Balanced Translocation support group for some guidance and to ask what their thoughts were on whether or not they felt it was “ethically irresponsible” to try to naturally have a pregnancy that could end in termination due to the safety of the female.

My group were so understanding and supportive of my dilemma… and pointed out to me that any pregnancy ever created can result in termination due to medical reasons (not just pregnancies with a known Balanced Translocation carrier) and while I might be more aware of the possibility that this can happen, did I think the average person was ethically irresponsible for trying to naturally have children, given it could happen to them too?

I love stats and went and did a little bit more research on this, given the views my group had shared with me. I found out that the likelihood of our pregnancy ending in termination for medical reasons is only just fractionally higher than that of the average person.

So back to the question, do I think the average person is ethically irresponsible for having a natural pregnancy that could end in termination?

Of course I don’t. If we all thought that no one would ever have kids, right?

To be honest, the average person probably doesn’t even know about their risk, and maybe it’s better just to be blissfully ignorant.

I obviously can’t pretend I don’t know about our level of risk, but at the same time, I know it’s a really unlikely outcome for us, just as it is for most people.

Given the reality check I’d received, I felt a little more comfortable going down the natural path again, knowing I can deal with the miscarriages, hoping that we wouldn’t be faced with the low risk of termination again and just trying to keep positive that maybe one day we might end up with a healthy second child.