After six years of suffering from infertility that doctors couldn’t explain, Michelle R. was ready to take more desperate measures. She had already given birth to two sons who were conceived naturally, but now, at 32 and yearning for a third child, she began in vitro fertilization at a Texas clinic.
There, reproductive endocrinologists stimulated her ovaries with hormones to produce many eggs that would then be fertilized in a lab with her husband’s sperm. The resulting embryos would be returned to her womb where, with luck, one would develop into a viable pregnancy and a healthy baby.
Success in any pregnancy depends on the embryo, and the fertility doctors at Michelle’s clinic strongly advised her to opt for an increasingly popular add-on procedure called Preimplantation Genetic Testing for Aneuploidy, or PGT-A. For an extra fee, the IVF clinic would send her embryos to a special lab for testing to determine if they were chromosomally normal (euploid) and likely to result in healthy pregnancies or chromosomally abnormal (aneuploid), which would likely result in miscarriage or a baby born with certain disorders, many incompatible with life.
