No Sex please, we are busy........!

Many affluent urban couples are choosing to make babies not in the bedroom but in the laboratory. Is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World finally here? Varuna Verma finds out.

Priya Shenoy had it all planned out. The 30-year-old Hyderabad-based doctor finished her post graduation in paediatrics a year ago. She planned to work for two years and then go abroad for higher studies. And she wanted her personal life to be in sync with her professional one.

"I wanted to have a baby one year before I started my doctoral studies," says Shenoy. She tried to conceive the natural way - but gave up in two months. "It was not suiting us," she recalls. Both Shenoy and her doctor  husband work long hours. When they return home, they are too tired to tango. "We kept postponing it from one night to another. Soon the pressure started building," she says.

So Shenoy got technology to come to their aid. She opted for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment earlier this year, got pregnant in the first shot and is expecting a baby soon.

Like Shenoy, many working women in urban India are no longer making babies in the bedroom. Instead, they are opting for fertility treatment. "I get five women patients every month who want fertility treatment for lifestyle reasons, not medical ones," says Samit Shekhar, chief embryologist, Kiran Infertility Centre, Hyderabad. Most of these women are between 30 and 32 years of age, work long hours and rarely get to spend quality time with their spouse, he adds.

As young Indians increasingly live life on the fast lane, and the mouse seems to have replaced the spouse, fertility treatments are just what the doctor ordered for them, believes sociologist G. K. Karanth. "Urban society has become accomplishment- driven and people are living life in an accelerated mode. They want quick money, quick success and a quick baby," he says. Also, with increasing individualism, emotional intensity has reduced in relationships. "Making a baby in the bedroom or the laboratory is all the same thing," says Karanth.

Making a baby in the bedroom is a hit and miss affair and can take up to a year. Most women don't have that much time any more. Many of her patients have slotted a time for the baby, after which they want to get  on with their jobs.

A patient, Shruti Mishra, who wanted an IVF because she had a few relaxed months at work. An IT professional, Mishra was waiting for a promotion. She had a few months to spare before the work pressure built up. So she wanted to have a baby quickly. Mishra opted for an IVF and became pregnant within a month.

Again, like Mishra who was touching 33, a lot of women delay pregnancy nowadays. When they finally decide to have a baby, they are in a hurry. They don't want to spend months trying to conceive normally.

It is a fact that technology scores over nature when it comes to the success rate for conceiving a baby. The success rate of conceiving naturally is seven per cent. Women have a fertile period of four days in a month. If they are traveling, working late hours or are under any stress, it gets wasted. On the other hand, there is a 50 per cent chance of conceiving through IVF and a 25 per cent chance through intrauterine insemination (IUI).

Last month, Suresh and Swati Gupta - a Mumbai-based pilot couple - approached a doctor for IVF treatment. Preliminary tests showed both were healthy and could conceive naturally. They were counseled to relax, take time out for each other and have a baby without technical support. But they turned down the suggestion. Both had hectic work schedules and did not meet often. They said they did not want to go through the psychological stress of trying to have a baby the normal way. Swati got an IVF done and is now pregnant.

And these artificial methods are not too expensive either. Intrauterine insemination, for instance, costs between Rs 5,000 and Rs 20,000. It is a 15-minute job. It needs no anaesthesia and no hospitalisation. The IUI procedure involves taking the semen from the man, washing it and placing it in the reproductive tract of a woman on the day she is ovulating. The IVF procedure is more expensive - one cycle of IVF costs about Rs  1.5 lakh. Increasing awareness and a high success rate have made IVF a popular treatment.

So are healthy, fertile women seeking artificial means to conceive even in the West? Perhaps not in as great numbers. It's easier to get an IVF treatment done in India. In the West, a woman cannot opt for IVF until she has tried to conceive naturally for one year.

Many career women are also freezing their fertility for later use. The procedure is called Oocyte Vitrification. "Women can freeze their eggs and use them later, when they decide to have a baby," explains Shekhar of Kiran Infertility Centre. Till five years ago, the procedure, which costs between Rs 80,000 and Rs 1 lakh, was only used to save the eggs of women undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. But now many healthy women are opting to freeze their eggs simply because they want to postpone pregnancy.

"I get half a dozen enquiries a week," says Shekhar. He recently performed the procedure on a 31-year-old ramp model, Shikha Iyer, who planned to have a baby five years later. "Iyer was in the prime of her career and didn't want a pregnancy to come in the way," recalls the embryologist.

As for those who do want a baby right away, work stress often stands in the way. In 2003, a study was conducted on the sexual habits of 1,920 software professional couples in Bangalore. It was found that 27 per cent of men and 18 per cent of women suffered from sluggish libidos. After a long day at work, many couples are not interested in sex.

If the patient is biologically able to conceive, she is counseled to take a break from work, do regular exercise, try relaxation techniques and spend time with her spouse, explaining that this will help her to conceive quickly and naturally.

But relaxing is no longer an easy thing to do for young couples. Most women say they can't afford to take time out to relax before they have a baby. For them, an IVF procedure is simply the more hassle-free option.

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