Triplets, quads, and other multi-baby births are getting rarer
The number of IVF treatments has more than doubled in the last decade, but triplets are increasingly uncommon in the US.
Do you know any quintuplets? What about quads? Triplets, even? The answer to all those is much less likely to be “yes” going forward than it was at the turn of the century.
According to figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, cited in a new report from the CDC, triplet and higher-order multiple births have fallen by 62% since 1998, with the decline rising to 79% for births with four or more babies. Mostly, researchers are pointing to advancements and newer guidelines around in vitro fertilization, or IVF, to explain the drop-off in the multi-baby birth rate.
In 2023, just under 74 births in every 100,000 in the US produced three or more children, down from ~194 some 25 years earlier, when multiple births rose as a result of the increasing prevalence of IVF and other fertility treatments. In the ’90s, it was more common to transfer multiple embryos to the uterus at the same time to boost the chances of success, which inevitably led to a rise in the number of pregnancies that produced three or more babies.
However, guidelines first issued in 2004 — and updated six times in the years since — have been put in place by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology to curb the number of embryos transferred in IVF treatment, as scientists become more aware of the risks involved in the process.
While IVF has gotten safer for prospective mothers, the treatment is still incredibly pricey due to the high-skill manual input required to perform the procedure. The Department of Health and Human Services this year estimated that a single IVF cycle costs between $15,000 and $20,000 in the US on average, and can sometimes exceed $30,000. Fertility is an increasingly active sector of venture capital, with fertility startups raising more than $870 million last year, per PitchBook. Indeed, one company in Mexico, Conceivable, has raised $20 million in funding to build robots that can reportedly help automate parts of the IVF process, in a bid to eventually widen access to the treatment.
