PETALING JAYA:
Siti Syarilla Mohd Zaid and her husband, 32-year-old operations supervisor Saiful Hasari Shaari, could hardly contain their joy when they welcomed three bundles of joy on Thursday. Once they were told they would never have a baby.
Siti Syarilla was told she was expecting after six months of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment sponsored by the Tunku Azizah Fertility Foundation (TAFF).
“I was depressed when I was told that I could not have children. It’s a miracle that I now do, and I owe it all to God,” the human resources executive said.
She has endometriosis, a condition in which the tissue that normally lines the uterus grows in other areas of the body, causing pain, irregular menstruation and infertility.
The babies were born about five minutes apart at the Universityi Malaya Medical Centre.
The TAFF founder, Tengku Puan Pahang Tunku Azizah Aminah Maimunah Iskandariah, visited the couple at the hospital. Siti Syarilla cried with joy and thanked Tunku Azizah. She and her husband were considering naming their daughter after her.
“The doctors said there was no hope for Siti, but I said to give it a try because you never know,” said Tunku Azizah.
She later visited the newborns, who were in incubators on a different floor. One is a girl and the other a boy. Doctors were worried about the condition of the third newborn as it was the smallest of the three, weighing a mere 495g.
“The chances of survival for the other two are good but for the smallest one, maybe not so,” Tunku Azizah said.
IVF has a success rate of 40 per cent. Twenty years ago, it was between 10 and 15 per cent.
IVF is a technique for conception of a human embryo outside the mother’s body. Several ova, or eggs, are removed from the mother’s body and placed in special laboratory culture dishes (Petri dishes); sperm from the father are then added, or in many cases a sperm is injected directly into an ovum, a process known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection.
If fertilization is successful, a fertilized ovum (or several fertilized ova), after undergoing several cell divisions, is either transferred to the mother’s or a surrogate mother’s body for normal development in the uterus, or frozen for later implantation. Eggs also can be frozen and fertilized later.
First developed by Patrick C. Steptoe and Robert G. Edwards of Great Britain (where the first “test-tube baby” was born under their care in 1978), the technique was devised for use in cases of infertility when the woman’s fallopian tubes are damaged or the man’s sperm count is low. It is also used to enable prospective parents with other reproductive problems (e.g., inability to produce eggs, poor sperm quality, or endometriosis) to bear a child.
In embryo donation (also called embryo adoption), frozen embryos that are not needed by the mother are donated for implantation to a woman or couple who are infertile but wish to have, and are capable of bearing, children. The use of in vitro fertilization has resulted in the birth of more than 500,000 babies.
Nevertheless, the technique has raised legal, ethical, and religious issues, including concerns regarding legal custody of frozen embryos following divorce and questions regarding the appropriateness of the procedure posed by the Roman Catholic Church and other institutions.
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