When there was no IVF: how infertility was treated in the USSR

Now specialists from reproduction centers can help patients with even the most severe forms (for example, if a woman’s uterus is removed or there is no sperm in the man’s ejaculate). At the same time, the diagnosis of “infertility” sounded like a sentence, and the woman was traditionally blamed for the absence of children.

Men have nothing to do with it

Paradoxically, despite the fact that in about half of cases, problems with conception are due to the male factor, almost no one knew about this.

At the turn of the eighties and nineties of the last century in the consultation “Marriage and Family”, which was opened in Moscow, for the first time the term “andrology” sounded, which people had not heard before.

It was then that they finally began to talk about the fact that problems with conception can be due to violations both on the part of the female and on the part of the male reproductive system.

In many cases, the wife’s reproductive health turned out to be in perfect order, while the husband was diagnosed with certain pathologies that impede successful conception.

And again the paradox: traditionally, only women were treated.

Pain diagnosis

If now many procedures that are used to diagnose the causes of infertility (for example, ultrasound examination of the pelvic organs in a woman or the scrotum in a man) do not cause any unpleasant sensations to patients, and other studies are carried out with anesthesia, then in the USSR the situation was completely different.

Most of the procedures were painful, and anesthesia was rarely used. An example is metrosalpingography – an X-ray examination of the patency of the fallopian tubes. The women were so hurt during this terrible procedure that they often fainted from the painful shock.

The beginning of the IVF era in the USSR

A pioneer in the field of IVF was a young researcher at the Simferopol Medical Institute, Grigory Petrov. However, the party administrative system, lack of adequate funding and the possibility of exchanging experience with foreign scientists actually buried the idea and postponed the onset of the ART era in the Soviet Union.

The first child in the USSR, conceived in vitro, was born in February 1986. This event was preceded by research carried out in the Soviet Union for two decades, since the creation of a special research group, which later grew into a full-fledged laboratory under the leadership of Professor Boris Vasilyevich Leonov.

How is it now?

Over the years, technology has leaped forward.

– To receive more eggs use different schemes to stimulate ovulation, so the chances of success for an IVF program have increased markedly.

– For the treatment of male infertility began to use ICSI method: This is a preliminary selection of the sperm with the best characteristics and its introduction directly into the egg.

– Programs are recommended for men and women with very poor quality germ cells or none at all IVF with donor genetic material.

– If a woman for health reasons cannot tolerate pregnancy (for example, due to the absence of a uterus or cardiovascular insufficiency), the procedure comes to the rescue surrogacy.

– Via vitrification method oocytes, sperm and embryos can be frozen and stored for a long time in order to use them in the future for the birth of a child in the IVF cycle.