According to the report by the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), the number of test-tube babies who were born increased in 2012, making an all-time high rating ever since the technology was introduced.
The report was released on Monday saying that there were 61,170 test tube babies who were born healthy. This number is a result of 165,172 in-vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures performed by 379 SART-accredited clinics. IVF is the process by which the egg from the mother or a donor is fertilized by a sperm cell through laboratory procedures.
The 2012 statistics has 2000 more test-tube babies than the recorded rate in 2011. In 2012, there are 3.9 million babies born in the U.S and test-tube babies accounts for 1.5 percent of these births. Furthermore, data revealed that the mean age by which women give birth increased, signifying that women tend to wait longer before they decide to have a child. Another factor for this is fertility problems, which become more prevalent as women become older. The average age of women who gave birth for the first time for 2012 is 26 years old compared to 21.4 years old in 1970.
Although there are more people who turn to IVF for their reproductive problems, critics of the procedure are still pointing out the technology's flaws.
For instance, previous data made by SART showed that IVF attempts which resulted in the birth of a child is increased by tenfold for women who is under 35 years old than for those who are 42 and above.
"It's important for people to understand that women over 35 have the highest percentage of failures," author of the book Cracked Open: Liberty, Fertility and the Pursuit of High Tech Babies, Miriam Zoll, said to Reuters.
Another criticism hurled at IVF is that the insertion of multiple embryos into the mother's womb to increase the probability of pregnancy sometime result to the birth of twin, triplets, and higher multiples. These children are often born with very low weights and a variety of congenital diseases. However, in 2012, fertility clinics began transferring few embryos per cycle which resulted to the decreased birth rate of twins and triplets.
