Embryo Mortality and In Vitro Fertilization
This essay hopes to convey the problematic framework of outcomes for assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) as they are published today, reframe the logic to focus on human embryo mortality, and quantify a population of human beings generally not accounted for in publicly available in-vitro fertilization data. This analysis, conducted using the CDC’s 2015 National Summary data in conjunction with a retrospective study conducted by one of the nation’s largest ART delivery systems, is one of the first attempts to estimate pre-transfer embryo mortality in IVF. This analysis focuses on fresh non-donor cycles only, that is, rounds of IVF treatment that include immediate transfer of at least one embryo and in which the embryos transferred were engendered using the recipient’s own eggs.