Some interesting stats, via Peggy Orenstein's Times Magazine essay on the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies over the last three decades:
The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has issued voluntary guidelines on the number of embryos doctors should transfer to help reduce the likelihood of multiples with their scary complications: prematurity, lung impairments, cerebral palsy. And death: twins are 6 times more likely and triplets 17 times more likely than singletons to die in infancy. Most reputable clinics observe the guidelines, but there's always temptation to fudge. What if a couple has only enough money for one round of treatment and wants to be sure — really, really sure — that it works? Or a clinic's success rates, which are posted on the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control, begin to founder and need a boost to stay competitive? Such pressures may contribute to the high rate of I.V.F. multiples produced in this country. Only 1 percent to 2 percent of naturally conceived children are twins. Among I.V.F. babies, it's 32 percent.
Fascinatingly, though, in Europe, where universal health coverage pays for the cost of fertility treatments, the rate of multiples born from IVF is just 5 percent -- a staggering difference. Opponents of government guaranteed health care like to argue that when the public sector is footing the bill, consumers overspend, paying for treatments they don't really need. This is a counterexample: Because Europeans know they will be covered if they seek a second or third implantation procedure, they don't take the risk of implanting 5 or 6 fertilized eggs during one procedure, which leads to those risky (and expensive) twin and triplet pregnancies.
--Dana Goldstein
