Can multiple births occur?
In the early days of fertility drugs doctors were not always sure of the doses to use and many of the women using the drugs had multiple pregnancies because more than one egg was released and fertilised at the same time. Twins did not cause too many problems, but far more people than expected had triplets, quads or even more babies and regrettably, the survival rate of some of these tiny babies was poor. But with today’s increased knowledge of the way fertility drugs work and control of the dosage, large multiple pregnancies are now very rare indeed. The fact that the HFEA permits the transfer of a maximum of 2 embryos for most patients has greatly reduced the incidence of multiple pregnancy.
