IVF creates anxious Mums

Parenting a new baby is always a challenge but for parents of IVF babies the emotional journey can have a long-lasting impact that may create highly anxious parents, recent research suggests. 

The statistics on IVF births in Australia are startling. One in 20 Australian babies born this year - that's about 10,000 babies - will have been conceived through IVF. It has become a miracle infertility cure for many but the emotional journey for those involved in the treatment can have a long-lasting impact that may create highly anxious parents, recent research suggests. 

A longitudinal study co-ordinated by Karin Hammarberg, a research fellow at the Key Centre for Women's Health in Society at the University of Melbourne, found that IVF mothers were more likely than their non-IVF peers to have a caesarean birth, they were three times more likely to seek help from an early parenting centre and their babies were more likely to be bottle-fed by three months of age. 

"We think that experiencing infertility and the added stress of using Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) has a cumulative effect, eroding women's confidence in themselves and in their bodies," Hammarberg says.
"Although once you are pregnant, you are not classed as infertile any more, women told us that they feel that perception of themselves doesn't go away. Once the baby is born, these women can feel a lot of anxiety about keeping their baby alive. They feel they have been let down by their bodies over a number of years and might also feel that they can't do anything by themselves."

She says that the high rates of admission to early parenting centres by IVF mothers indicate these women could benefit from having better preparation for parenting while they are pregnant. 

"There is a high expectation of what life is going to be like once this long-awaited baby arrives but there is a big discrepancy between what they think will happen and the reality of having a new baby."  

Women who have been through fertility treatment are less likely to ask for support until they reach a stage where they really can't cope, she says. 

"They consider themselves very lucky to have this baby and so there is a sense that they are not entitled to complain about anything. They think that they should be coping better." 

One in six Australian couples is affected by infertility, says Australia's National Infertility Network, ACCESS, which defines infertility as not conceiving after 12 months of regular unprotected sexual intercourse. "It's a huge issue and it's not going to go away," says Nichola Bedos, a psychologist who, since 2002, has been counselling couples undergoing fertility treatment.

Bedos quotes researchers who predict the success rate of IVF is likely to double during the next decade and, together with a decreasing fertility rate, this could result in 30 per cent of all babies being conceived by IVF in coming decades. Bedos found the emotional impact of fertility treatment on those who participate can be long-lasting and couples who have a successful outcome, with a healthy baby, will still often doubt their parenting abilities. Her new book, IVF and Ever After (Rockpool Publishing, $32.95), provides a hands-on guide for those going through the often traumatic journey of assisted conception.

"When I was working with these families, I started to see some common trends; there was a pervasive fear of loss and couples tended to be very anxious," she says. 

Bedos says she has worked with so many families that she has a good insight into their needs."Sometimes I've been practically sitting on the steps of the IVF clinic with them, waiting to hear their results," she says.

She has developed a treatment plan that starts with acknowledging the impact that a diagnosis of infertility has on a couple. The most common emotional reactions are sadness and loss, she says, but many people don't spend time and energy going through the grieving process and find it difficult to talk about their experiences with friends and family members.

Christine Haydon and her husband went through a series of IVF treatments for four years before the birth of their identical twin daughters. "We didn't talk to our family or our friends about it at all while we were going through the treatment," she says. "Most of them didn't know."

This can make the experience even more difficult, Bedos says. "Isolation is a big problem for anyone who is going through IVF." The treatment has also brought a huge change in the psyche of parenthood, she says.

People now have an expectation that if they want to have a child and they are not at first successful that they can turn to IVF and it will deliver a miracle. "People have high expectations of IVF, which can make it so much harder to accept infertility; the pain that I have seen people go through when they want to have a child and cannot have it is incredibly intense," she says.

The process of IVF is invasive and highly stressful, with the added "ticking clock" pressure on women over 35 as success rates decline significantly after this age. IVF treatment is not typically a one-cycle process, which makes it all the more nerve-wracking. The likelihood of conception after three IVF cycles is about 65 per cent but, depending on the woman's age, it can be only 35 per cent - or less - after one cycle.

But the joy of a successful conception doesn't usually last all through the pregnancy, Bedos says. After the first few days following the confirmation of pregnancy, celebration is often quickly followed by bouts of overwhelming anxiety.

One woman quoted in the book says she was "desperate to keep this miracle baby and terrified that it isn't going to last".

But couples who have been through the IVF procedure and are understandably anxious during pregnancy often have nowhere to turn.

"Throughout IVF treatment there is a lot of scrutiny and monitoring," Hammarberg says. "But once they are pregnant, many women reported that they felt that they were in limbo. They were treated just like any other pregnant woman but they felt they needed more reassurance." Hammarberg says additional recognition by health-care professionals of the difficulties that these women have experienced could reduce the anxiety and stress that carries over into early parenting.

The numbers
• The success rate of IVF is about 25 per cent.
• At age 24, a woman has more than four times the chance of an IVF cycle succeeding compared with a 40-year-old woman using her own eggs.
• Six per cent of IVF couples use a donor - either egg, sperm or embryo.
• 41,000 IVF cycles begin in Australia annually.
• IVF couples are nine times more likely to have twins than non-IVF couples.
• About 58 per cent of IVF babies are male, compared with 51 per cent of male babies conceived naturally.

More information
• Access - Australia's National Infertility Network  9737 0158
• Assisted Reproduction Technology Mums' section on Mothers Be Heard 
• IVF & Ever After by Nichola Bedos
• Australian Multiple Birth Association
• Fertility Australia - peak body for reproductive medicine
• Key Centre for Women's Health in Society
For more information on Fertility & Conception see:
 
Talk to others about their conception experiences in the EB Conception forums.