Millennial Money: Managing the high cost of infertility

No one plans for infertility. But that doesn't stop it from being a reality for millions of people. In the United States, around 12 per cent of women ages 15 to 44 have difficulty getting pregnant or carrying a pregnancy to term, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some of them turn to in vitro fertilization to try to conceive, with more than 72,000 babies born as a result of IVF and other "assisted reproductive technologies" in 2017, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

Conceiving is just one obstacle these patients face. There's also the question of how to pay for the treatment. "The total cost is roughly USD 20,335 per (IVF) cycle," says Jake Anderson-Bialis, co-founder of FertilityIQ, which provides research on fertility treatments, doctors and clinics.

Most IVF patients don't get pregnant the first go-round. Many require multiple cycles, spending USD 60,000 or more in the process. The sky-high costs and scant insurance coverage — only a handful of states require coverage for fertility treatments, and that coverage varies widely — leave families struggling to pay on their own.

Arielle Spiegel and her husband had some insurance coverage but still spent roughly USD 70,000 in fertility treatments, including multiple rounds of IVF. "Nobody, myself included, is truly prepared for the cost involved," says Spiegel, founder of CoFertility, which offers tools and resources to help navigate fertility treatment. You want to stay optimistic, but it's important to think ahead. While your physical and emotional limits can be hard to anticipate, you can sketch a plan for your financial ceiling.

"One of the most important things to talk about at the beginning is, 'At what point do we stop?'" says Dawn Davenport, executive director of Creating a Family, a nonprofit focused on adoption and infertility education. "Continue to reassess. Because at the beginning you don't have a clue how all-consuming it can be." Thinking about what comes next if IVF doesn't work is painful but necessary, because alternate options like surrogates, donor eggs and adoption are also expensive..

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)