Lisa A. Rinehart - Getting Pregnant For Dummies

Getting Pregnant For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020930130

ISBN 978-1-119-60115-9 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-60119-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-60123-4 (ebk)

1. Chapter 6
2. Chapter 7
3. Chapter 9
4. Chapter 16

1. Chapter 2
2. Chapter 3
3. Chapter 6
4. Chapter 11
5. Chapter 12
6. Chapter 17

If youre dealing with infertility, you may feel alone, confused, and depressed over the potential loss of the dream youve cherished since childhood: the dream of having a baby of your own.

Infertility is a medical problem for 68 million Americans. Deemed a disease by the World Health Organization but debated as a symptom by many professional organizations, insurance companies often deny coverage for its diagnosis and treatment. Many people (the just relax and youll get pregnant crowd) dont understand its biological origins, and a few (the take this magic pill and youll get pregnant, guaranteed! group) even exploit those suffering from it. There is good news on the infertility front, however; not only are medical treatments for infertility making great gains, but theres also more awareness of the emotional and social effects of infertility. In fact, most reproductive medicine centers like to call themselves fertility centers now.

Getting Pregnant For Dummies was conceived by combining Jackie Thompsons knowledge of infertility from a patients viewpoint, Lisa Rineharts wealth of information as an infertility nurse and reproductive law attorney, and Dr. John Rineharts 40 years of clinical practice in reproductive medicine. We wrote this book so that patients dealing with infertility will know that theyre not alone and what they may be up against. We hope it finds its way to the bookshelves and nightstands of all the patients who need it to help find the road to their baby.

This book is our attempt to help those of you who want to walk into the doctors office and not walk out feeling out of control of your own fertility. Our vision is to provide fertility patients both those at the starting line and those closer to the finish and the people who love them with as much information as we can on the options available to them. We discuss topics ranging from the scientific to the spiritual.

You can read through this book from front to back and feel confident that you can find the answer to just about any fertility issue, from natural family planning to cloning. But if youre like most people, youll probably look through the table of contents, zero in on the chapters that affect you, and jump directly to them. This book is meant as a resource, which means that you can go back to it whenever a new issue or question arises and find the answer you need without reading through everything that comes before.

This book is meant for people with every degree of fertility expertise, from the novice to the jaded, been-there-done-that patient. The no-tech and low-tech fertility chapters come first, so you can skip them if youre already a veteran and move right into high-tech and really high-tech stuff found in the second half of the book.

We intersperse personal stories throughout the book; these (we hope!) make interesting reading from the viewpoint of either Lisa (an infertility nurse/attorney), Jackie (an infertility patient), or Dr. R (the IVF doctor). If you skip them, you wont miss any essential information, although you may miss a few humorous sidelines or I did it, so you can too stories.

To help you pick out information from a page, we use the following conventions throughout the text to make elements consistent and easy to understand; the last thing we want to do is confuse you!

• New terms appear in italics and are closely preceded or followed by an easy-to-understand definition. Italics are also used for emphasis.
• Bold highlights the keywords in bulleted lists.

We think every word in this book is interesting and educational, but we understand that sometimes you just need a quick answer to a burning question. Other times you want to discover everything possible about infertility, even the technical stuff. Weve designated some information as interesting-but-not-essential-to-read. Feel free to read it, but if you skip it, youre not missing anything vital. Optional sections are