No. I don’t want twins. Because I don’t want 3 kids. And because twins are gestationally high-risk. You don’t want to go through IVF, put 2 embryos in, have them both take, then have delivery complications, have them be premature, or worse, lose them both at say 17 weeks. The chances may be low, but low is still too high for me.
Twins can happen a few ways:
1. Put in more than one viable embryo
2. Put in one viable embryo, then also get busy in the same time period, and get pregnant the old-faashioned way as well as the new fandangled way at the same time. (I know someone who, believing she couldn’t get pregnant the old-fashioned way, did this and had twins.)
3. Put in one embryo and it splits into identical twins (I don’t know if this is possible with IVF – I’ll find out!)
People put in more than one viable embryo at a time to increase their odds of getting pregnant in a single transfer. This gets deep into probability-math, so let’s stick with a simple example.
Say the chances of getting pregnant with an implanted egg are 50%. If you put 2 in at the same time, then you have a 75% chance of getting pregnant- but a 25% chance of having twins. (Options are YY, YN, NY, NN.)
Because of the risks of twins, there is a general push in the obstetrics community to only implant one embryo at a time – but it is the parents who ultimately make the choice.
In my case, because my embryos will have been screened for chromosomal viability, there will be a 60% chance of success. If I were to put in two viable embryos, my chances of twins would be more like 35%, if my probability math is right – which it might not be. For sure though it’s higher than 25%, and that’s too high for me!
So. One embryo + no hanky-panky = one kid… hopefully.