Annika Levitt initially resisted the fertility clinic’s suggestion that only one embryo — rather than the usual two or more — be transferred to her uterus because she was too small to risk carrying more than one baby.
“You go through all that and you put only one back in?” she recalled thinking, fearing it would lower her chances of becoming pregnant.
But her embryos had been tested for chromosomal abnormalities, giving a fair degree of confidence that the chosen one was healthy. “Knowing that it was the strongest of the strong was reassuring,” she said. Levitt, who lives in Morris County, N.J., gave birth to a girl from that embryo and is now pregnant from another single-embryo transfer.
The chromosomal testing is one of the techniques now coming into use to help fertility clinics answer one of their most vexing questions: Which test-tube embryo or embryos will give a woman the best shot at having a baby?
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Another new technique uses time-lapse imaging to study the development pattern of the embryo.
Both techniques can potentially provide more information than the approach now used to judge an embryo’s fitness, which is to look at its shape under a microscope.
Read the full, original story: Fertility clinics scan for the strongest embryo
