LAUSR

More than 8 million babies have been born from in vitro fertilization (IVF) around the world since Louise Brown’s birth in 1978. The number of IVF treatment cycles has globally increased to more than 2 million per year (1). In Europe, treatment numbers lately grew by an estimated 7% per year, with Denmark and Belgium at the top of the league table, each offering more than 2500 IVF treatment cycles per million people (2). Assisted reproduction has arrived to take its place within mainstream medicine. Infertility has also lost its social stigma: a quick google search on the keywords infertility & support and infertility & stigma yields 119 million and 2.3 million results, respectively, a 51:1 ratio in favour of support. Important milestones in assisted human reproduction were the cryopreservation of embryos (1984) and oocytes (2003), the introduction of ICSI (1992), the use of testicular sperm (1993), preimplantation genetic testing (1989), ovarian tissue transplantation (2000), uterus transplantation (2015) and ‘three-parent babies’ after mitochondrial transfer (2016). These techniques, together with the availability, on a global scale, of gamete donation and gestational surrogacy, provide a wide range of treatment options for people faced with subfertility or infertility. The chance of having a full-term, normal birth weight and singleton live birth per IVF cycle using fresh embryos from non-donor eggs for women younger than 35, according to US figures from 2015, is 21.3% (3). In women 38–40 years of age, this number drops to 11.1% (3). For Australia, a live birth rate of 23.3% for fresh autologous embryo transfers has recently been reported (4). Of note, it is estimated that, for example, in Denmark, only approximately 50% of infertile couples initiating IVF treatment will eventually have a baby within a 5-year span (5).