Artificial insemination
Artificial inseminationArtificial Insemination
Artificial insemination, test-tube fertilization, frozen storage of embryos and surrogate parenting. For many people, these new and often controversial procedures of artificial reproduction hold out a last hope for starting a family. What happens during the insemination process is your physician uses a syringe to inject sperm into the cervical
canal right before or right on the day of ovulation. Since half of the sperm get lost in the cervix, the physician sometimes injects them directly into the uterus through a procedure known as intrauterine insemination or IUI.
Another method is the mixing of a sperm and ovum in a nutrient medium outside a woman's body, followed by implanting the fertilized egg into her uterus. In a third method the ovum is fertilized within one woman's uterus and then transferred to the body of another woman. Eggs can now also be removed from a woman's ovaries and placed in her fallopian tubes along with spermatozoa, thus allowing for normal fertilization.
Many times anonomus donors are used. Donors can be matched by factors such as race, color of eyes, hair and other physical characteristics, and are screened for conditions such as AIDS, gonorrhea and other STDS. Even though freezing sperm doesn't seem to affect a pregnancy, it reduces the sperm's movement and influences the success rate of artificial insemination. About 75 to 85 percent of women inseminated with fresh donor semen will get pregnant--especially if the procedure is repeated over several months. Unfortunately, freezing the sperm decreases the chances of success by 10 to 15 percent.
Today's reproductive technology is not limited to helping create human families. Reproductive specialists at the nation's zoos and research centers have begun to investigate ways to save endangered animals with these techniques. For some endangered species, the new procedures for reproduction--often designed to solve human fertility problems--offer a last hope for survival. Artificial reproduction can dramatically increase the breeding potential of...
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