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Here you will find answers to the most common questions about assisted reproduction and IVF at Medicus — from who can seek treatment, to egg retrieval, transfer, and the time afterward.
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Everyone who applies for assisted reproduction must present a child care certificate from July 1, 2020. This is a certificate from the police stating whether the applicant has previously been charged or convicted of a crime, such as sexual crimes, drug crimes, and violent and robbery crimes.
A remark on the certificate does not immediately mean a rejection of the application. The childcare certificate becomes part of the overall suitability assessment the doctor makes to determine whether everything is in place to ensure that the child will have a safe environment to grow up in.
Yes, you can! On May 26, 2020, the Storting passed amendments to the Biotechnology Act, which means fruitful legislative changes here in Norway. The party leaders have listened to you who are single and want children over time. This means that you as a single woman have the opportunity to become a mother with assisted fertilization. As with assisted fertilization for couples, you are assessed medically and psychosocially before the process is started. With assisted fertilization for singles, donor sperm is needed . In the case of sperm donation, the child has the right to know the donor's identity when she or he turns 15. This assumes that the child knows that it was conceived with the help of donor sperm, and according to the Biotechnology Act (§2-7), parents are obliged to inform about this as soon as it is advisable. If you would like to receive relevant information about assisted fertilization for single women, you can register here or read more about the process to get started here. About Medicus
We have written a blog post about this. See the answer, and feel free to comment here.
Yes. Children from previous marriages or sterilization are not grounds for refusal with us.
Yes. Assisted fertilization is a good method for treating sterilized women and men.
Yes. Regardless of whether you already have children or not, you can seek treatment with us.
Normally, between 5 and 15 eggs are retrieved, but the number varies between 1 and 35. We aim to retrieve as many eggs as we can during the egg retrieval. In rare cases, no eggs are retrieved.
Normally, the retrieval will take between 10 and 15 minutes, depending on the number of eggs that can be retrieved.
If you have undergone strong stimulation, it may take some time for your ovaries to regress, which may cause moderate to mild pain for a few days after the reversal. The reversal itself is not painful.
There is no evidence that resting after the return has any effect on whether or not you will get pregnant. You can resume all normal activities and you will not need to take sick leave.
This depends. Usually we transfer one, but sometimes two. See the blog post about one or two embryos in IVF.
Normally, you will have your period about 10 days after a blastocyst transfer if you do not become pregnant. Sometimes it may be the case that you do not have your period before you stop the supportive treatment. In such cases, a pregnancy test will be taken after 10 days. If this is negative, you stop the supportive treatment and then you will have bleeding. Bleeding that occurs earlier than 10 days may be a signal that you have received supportive treatment that has been a little too weak.
It is common and necessary to give progesterone supplements after the transfer of fertilized eggs when you have been downregulated during stimulation. The ovaries are not able to produce enough progesterone to maintain the pregnancy. The importance of such support treatment is more debated when the stimulation has been done without downregulation. Some clinics choose to give support treatment other than progesterone.
Yes. Since January 2011, we have offered treatment with donor sperm to heterosexual and lesbian couples. Amendments to the Biotechnology Act opened up assisted fertilization for singles from 01.07.2020.
If you transfer an embryo (fertilized egg), the probability is no higher than with a naturally occurring pregnancy.
Of the couples who become pregnant after transferring two embryos, 25% of the couples will have a twin pregnancy. The risk of triplets is very small when only two embryos are transferred.
In a naturally occurring pregnancy, the risk of multiples is 5%.
Many people choose IVF treatment because of damaged fallopian tubes. Therefore, the risk of ectopic pregnancy with IVF is around 5%, compared to 1% in the general population.
IVF treatment does not increase the risk of malformations in the child, but neither does it protect against the naturally occurring risk of malformation. This is around 2–3%. The risk of malformations naturally increases with age.
The answer is yes, you can get help to have children even if you have a man who has been sterilized. When a man is sterilized, the spermatic cord is cut so that sperm from the testicles are not included in the seminal fluid during ejaculation, but the production of sperm cells continues inside the testicles. At Medicus, we have extensive experience with retrieving sperm from both the epididymis and the testicle. Read more about how we can help with different methods here.
Whether you are a woman or a man and have been sterilized, assisted reproduction can be a good method to still get pregnant. For men, we can extract sperm from the testicle or epididymis, and in women, we do not depend on the fallopian tubes being intact (they are the ones that are cut during sterilization) to achieve fertilization and pregnancy.
If it is the woman who has been sterilized, standard in vitro fertilization (IVF) may be sufficient, provided that the man's sperm quality is normal.
If it is the man who has been sterilized, we must use surgical sperm retrieval to retrieve sperm cells, and microinjection (ICSI) in addition to IVF.
Have you been sterilized and are wondering if it has worked? It is recommended that you check the sterilization with a semen sample 6-8 weeks after the sterilization has been performed. At Medicus you can do such a check. We have our own semen laboratory and have been performing semen analyses since 2002. We have semen laboratories in Trondheim, Stavanger and Oslo and you can either take the sample at home or in a suitable room here at Medicus. A referral is not necessary, you can contact us directly to arrange an appointment.
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