Robert Stillman, medical director emeritus at Shady Grove Fertility Center in Rockville, Md., which says it performs more IVF cycles than any other U.S. “A lot of this has to do with increased success rates,” says Dr. By 2000, that figure had grown to nearly 1 million, and by 2007, it had climbed to more than 2 million. In 1990, a little more than a decade after the first IVF birth, about 95,000 babies were born. China, which is thought to account for close to 20% of IVF births, doesn’t report its data, although Adamson said the Ministry of Health has indicated it’s working toward that goal.īirths have increased exponentially over the years, according to the research. But just 74 countries have ever tracked and shared their data, and they don’t all do so consistently. There are nearly 200 countries in the world, and Adamson estimates that about half have at least one IVF clinic. “The reality is no one will ever know exactly how many babies have been born because no one ever counted.” “There is so much missing data, which is the reason this hasn’t been done until now,” says Adamson. About 10 years ago, that organization evolved into ICMART, which has continued to collect information about IVF births. The figures in the 10 reports come in part from the International Working Group for Registers on Assisted Reproduction, a volunteer group of physicians that banded together in the late 1980s to begin collecting IVF data. Researchers are relying on data that assumes they have information on two-thirds of reported IVF cycles worldwide. They relied on available data, which is far from complete, meaning that 5 million births is really a “best guess,” says Adamson.

The reports spanned the years from 1989 to 2007, with a few years missing in between. Until now, it’s been hard to get a handle on the number of IVF births worldwide, said Adamson, who is part of a nongovernmental organization called ICMART, or the International Committee for Monitoring Assisted Reproductive Technology. David Adamson, a reproductive endocrinologist in San Jose and Palo Alto, Calif., who led the efforts to analyze 10 reports from two international organizations that monitor births resulting from fertility treatment. “IVF has become sort of mainstream,” says Dr. What’s more, half of those babies have arrived in the past six years as stigma surrounding infertility has lessened and technology has improved, according to first-ever research presented Monday in Boston at the meeting of the International Federation of Fertility Societies and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Since then, in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, has become so common that researchers now estimate that some 5 million babies have followed Louise Brown’s much-heralded delivery. When the world’s first test-tube baby made her debut 35 years ago, the event seized headlines.

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