The great baby race


Mr and Mrs Swamy have lived for most of the 12 years of their blissfully wedded life. Not so blissful it turns out to be, for each time Mrs Swamy’s pregnancy wouldn’t last more than six-seven weeks. The Swamys tried for a baby seven times using a process called Intrauterine Insemination (IUI), which entails placing a sperm inside the uterus to facilitate fertilisation. They also tried in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) in the UK and India; another process in which the egg is combined with sperm outside the body. Mrs Swamy failed to get pregnant. The Swamys, now based in Australia, then flew to hometown Chennai to meet Dr Geetha Haripriya at Prashanth Fertility Research Centre. She started a fresh round of investigations that revealed aneuploidies (presence of an abnormal number of chromosomes in the foetus) in Mrs Swamy’s case. She had no family history of chromosomal abnormalities and the doctor attributed her age as a contributing factor to her condition. Dr Haripriya recommended intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) to enable fertilisation and subsequently preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) for the embryos. In the next IVF cycle, 11 embryos were screened using PGS at MedGenome Labs in Bengaluru. The report recommended the best embryos for transfer to Mrs Swamy’s womb with  happy results and the stork visited them in May.

Forty years ago to this week, the first IVF baby was born in India. On October 3, 1978, Dr Subhash Mukhopadhyay and his team in Calcutta had delivered happiness to the lives of a childless couple in the adorable form of Durga, brought into the world using the revolutionary method. Dr Mukhopadhyay, a pioneer in the world of fertility research, had created history because Durga is only the second IVF baby in the world.Infertility is spreading at an alarming pace in India, especially in metros. It is estimated that of the 60-80 million infertile couples that are yearly recorded across the globe, between 15-20 million are in India. Doctors say the stigma of barrenness is curable and infertility is like any other medical condition.....Read more

 

Source web page: New indian Express


Comments (0)



Please Login or Register to join groups