IVF pregnancies may be happier than natural ones
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Women who conceive through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are just as happy in late pregnancy as women who conceive naturally—maybe even more so, new research from Israel suggests.
It had been thought that IVF moms were more stressed than those who conceived naturally. “A lot of studies have come out and said that they were indeed more anxious and they were having a worse time of it,” Dr. Marsha Kaitz of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health. “My paper says that that isn’t necessarily the case. The women that I interviewed were really quite positive.”
Trying to conceive through IVF is known to be stressful for women, but there is less information on how these women fare emotionally once they become pregnant, Kaitz and her colleague Einat Harf-Kashdaei write in the June issue of Fertility and Sterility.
Also, Kaitz points out, studies that have looked at this issue have assessed women’s mood via checklists, which make it difficult to fully evaluate person’s emotional experience. “It’s hard to register the kinds of feelings we feel as moms just on standardized scales,” Kaitz pointed out in an interview.
To get a fuller picture, Kaitz and Harf-Kashdaei conducted in-depth interviews about moods in terms of self, baby-to-be and spouse with 30 women who had become pregnant through IVF and 30 who conceived naturally. Interviews were conducted at 30 to 31 weeks’ gestation, on average.
The researchers transcribed the interviews, which ran for up to 50 pages each, and went through them phrase by phrase, labeling each emotional term the women used as positive or negative, and then tallying up these terms to give women scores for positivity, negativity, and total emotionality.
Women with IVF pregnancies reported fewer negative feelings and showed a more positive mood regarding themselves, their baby, and their spouse compared to women who had conceived naturally, the researchers found. Women who had required two or three cycles of IVF to conceive actually showed more positive feelings than those who conceived on the first try.
“They just had many less negative things to say, and even more positive things to say about their experience,” Kaitz said of the IVF moms overall.
The IVF situation in Israel is unique, the researchers note, given that the government provides unlimited funding for fertility treatment until a woman has given birth to two children. Nonetheless, according to Kaitz, the findings are probably more or less generalizable to women elsewhere in the world, and also suggest that women who conceive through IVF will be just as happy being parents as women who conceive naturally.
SOURCE: Fertility and Sterility, June 2007.
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