So, I also promised that I would comment on this Times piece about reducing pregnancies from twins to singletons, but before I get to that, I want to give some background about my experience of trying to become a parent (lest I have a multi-paragraph parenthetical interrupting my comments on reducing from two to one).
When my wife and I first decided to become parents, things didn’t go so smoothly. After some testing, we discovered that I have a *ridiculously* low sperm count—less than 1% of normal. And the few sperm I could produce could barely move. Some quick research revealed that if we wanted biological children, we’d have to do IVF. Not any old IVF, mind you, but ICSI—a special process where they place one individual sperm into an incredibly small needle and inject it directly into the egg—since that’s the only way sperm that I could produce could ever fertilize an egg.
So we though hard about it, waded into the ethical issues, calculated the costs, bemoaned the fact that we had *just* left a health insurance plan that actually covered this, and finally decided to do it.
But the day that we were scheduled to start the IVF process, I got one more lab test result (SCSA) which indicated that my sperm had highly fragmented DNA, so even if all went well with fertilization and implantation, any pregnancy that used my sperm had an extremely high chance of spontaneous abortion. At that point, we dropped the IVF process—it just wasn’t worth spending tens of thousands of dollars and giving my wife daily injections of hormones+drugs for a 98% chance of failure.
Then we returned to our original plan of adopting (family members had convinced us to table adoption and try IVF first), and now we have our 2 amazing kids from Korea.
