Our fertility specialist, he told us that there was no real increase in any sort of defects that the children may develop during conception via fertility treatment. He said that there was one study that showed that they had a slightly increased risk of, and he just put it "just" a cleft lip, and he advised me to do some research on my own at the various journals if I felt the need to do so.
Again, I didn’t feel comfortable with that answer, and when I went online at the time, this was about 4 or 5 years ago, there was very limited information that correlated increased birth defects with fertility, conceiving a child through fertility.
There was one study that had shown that there was an increased risk of cleft lip, cleft palate defect, and yet there was another study that said it didn’t increase. So there was a lot of contradiction.
What had happened, we just decided that if we felt as though that if I did conceive a child through fertility and the child came out with something as simple as an, I always say, an extra little pinky or an extra little toe, I know that personally I would have felt that I did something wrong and that it was because of this fertility treatment that I did, even though that studies did show at the time what was being told to us that there was no risk, but I felt as though that it did, if something were to happen, that I would always kind of think back that it was a cause of this.
And ironically, today when I was looking, researching a little bit about infertility, in November I found a study that was put out by the CDC in November 2008 that did show that children conceived through fertility had a two to four times greater risk of developing cleft lip, cleft palate, heart defects, and were 2 to 4 times more likely to be premature, and that was four or five years later.
So, that kind of just rang a bell to me, saying, "Whoa, five years ago they didn’t tell me this and now they are all of a sudden putting out this data. What else are they going to say in 10 years? What are they going to say in 20 years?" And that was what I was thinking about five years ago when we were talking to our fertility specialist. What’s going to happen, not in 4 or 5 years, but in 10 or 20 years too, as well.