For a while now, women have been warned about age causing significant deterioration in the quality of their eggs; and now it would seem that there is an even more important factor for determining a healthy and successful pregnancy – the health of a woman’s uterus could determine the success of a fertility treatment or its failure.
Babies born through IVF (in vitro fertilization) techniques were seen to have lower than regular birth weights, and it was thought that the reason for this is the mode of conception used.
However now it has been found that it is the health of the uterus that is more important than the quality of the eggs, which can determine the outcome of a pregnancy.
When women used donor eggs and their own uterus for their pregnancy, they were seen to have smaller babies, whereas in the case of infertile women whose eggs were used to harvest embryos which were then transplanted into the uterus of a surrogate mother, this resulted in women producing higher birth weight babies.
Women could be unable to have babies for several reasons – endometriosis, premature ovarian failure, and so on could render them infertile, which in turn could impact the sort of environment that a fetus could have in the womb and the degree of nurturing it could receive there.
