Woman uses Viagra to assist pregnancy
Reproduced with permission from www.ivfbabble.com
A 48-year-old woman has revealed she has welcomed a ‘miracle’ baby after inserting Viagra to get pregnant.
Carin Roskind and her husband Josh had been trying for a baby for five years after tying the knot.
Devastatingly, Carin miscarried on two occasions and had to turn to fertility treatment on what they classed as a ‘last ditch’ attempt to have the child they so desperately wanted.
The treatment cost the couple £32,000 using a 26-year-old egg donor and managed to gain 20 eggs, although they only managed to get one viable embryo which had been fertilised with Josh’s sperm.
She told WalesOnline that before the embryo transfer took place she had Viagra inserted to help with implantation.
She said: “When I got told I was pregnant after a year-long fertility journey, we were overjoyed. I really wanted to be pregnant; I believed my body could achieve that.”
She went on to say she saw a woman in Australia on Youtube who inserted Viagra before having a positive pregnancy test.
Carin said: “I went to my doctor and asked for Viagra and he said he had never heard of it working. I went back a few days later and my uterus lining began to grow and we were ready to go – my miracle baby is a Viagra product.
“It felt like a lot of hard work had paid off. A lot of women spend the whole nine months terrified.
“We made the decision to make the nine months grateful and believing that this was meant to be.”
Baby Shay was born on July 2, 2020, and will be three next month. He experienced some complications after the birth and spent some time in NICU before being allowed to come home.
Carin said: “We feel super blessed.”
Dr Valentine Akande MBBS PhD MRCOG, Medical Director, at the Bristol Centre for Reproductive Medicine, said: "Viagra is a medication that people use for erectile dysfunction and what it does it is can increase the blood flow. A woman with a thin lining of the womb, Viagra potentially can increase the blood flow to the lining of the womb.
"When it does, it has been reported that the lining of the womb thickens and we have used this before. There is some evidence that it can increase the lining of the womb, however, the studies have not shown that it results in higher success rates in pregnancy.
"When you have a patient where you try everything and nothing works then we would try Viagra. But, we don't use it in fertility treatment, we only use it in very rare circumstances.
"We would only use it for thin lining of the womb, we do not recommend this as a fertility treatment and it is not licensed for use in fertility treatment."
BCRM www.fertilitybristol.com is involved in innovative research covering a range of fertility issues and has one of the best success rates with IVF and other fertility treatments in the UK.
