Dedicated to You
Baylor is committed to helping couples who have been unable to conceive on their own by offering advanced reproductive services such as fertility evaluation and testing and assisted reproduction. And we provide comfortable, personalized care to meet your reproductive health needs.
If you are having difficulty becoming pregnant, chances are you have a lot of questions about why you are having trouble and how a fertility specialist might be able to help.
Before you make the financial and emotional investment in any reproductive services, you should get all the answers you need to make an informed, confident decision.
Infertility Causes
Causes of infertility are a wide range of physical as well as emotional factors including:
- Decreased Sperm Count
- Endometriosis
- Hormone Deficiency or Imbalance
- Impotence
- Ovarian Cysts
- Pelvic Inflammatory Disease
- Retrograde Ejaculation
- Transport system abnormality from the cervix through the fallopian tubes
- Varicocele
Fertility Evaluation
If there is a clear-cut problem, a couple should consult a reproduction specialist immediately and have a fertility evaluation. If there is no obvious reason for the infertility and the woman is less than 25 year old, couples should generally wait about two years before getting infertility evaluation from a reproduction specialist.
During a fertility evaluation the husband and wife have a medical history taken and a physical examination performed. Based on this information, extra testing may be ordered in addition to the standard infertility tests.
In Vitro Fertilization
In vitro fertilization involves removing mature eggs from the woman's ovaries and placing them in a sterile liquid with her husband's sperm to let the natural process of fertilization take place outside the womb. The fertilized eggs (pre-embryos) are then transferred to the wife's uterus.
Assisted hatching involves chemically or mechanically softening the shell of an egg after the process of IVF is complete. Opening the shell makes it easier for the embryo to "hatch" out the implant successfully into the mother's womb. This procedure is used most often with women over 38 and in cases where ICSI has been used to produce the pre-embryos.