How do multiple births, specifically octuplets, occur?
Dr. Paulson: Multiple gestation is a serious complication of fertility therapy. We’re not as good as nature is, to make sure only one egg is produced. Even though that is always our goal, sometimes we overshoot it and get multiple eggs, which can then lead to multiple births. Dr. Chung: The purpose of fertility treatments is to help patients conceive one baby at a time. Fertility treatments stimulate a woman’s ovaries to produce eggs. Increasing the number of eggs increases the chances of conception. Higher-order multiples result from super-ovulation with intrauterine insemination (inserting sperm into the uterus), or combining that with intercourse. We try to optimize the dosing of the medications, but there’s no way to control it 100 percent. That’s the type that results in multiples—most frequently twins and triplets, and occasionally quadruplets. Octuplets…10 years ago it happened in Houston. With the current guidelines, there’s about a 20 to 30 percent chance of twins and about a
