Did you know there is an alternative to IVF and that it is tubal surgery? Whether this type of an operation will work for you depends upon the reason for your infertility. However, you should definitely be aware that IVF is not the only recourse for infertility. Tubal surgery can be your answer instead.

What type of infertility problems does tubal surgery help with? One of the leading causes of infertility is tubal blockage of some type. Many times brought on by disease, the tubal blockage prevents the egg from reaching the uterus. Tubal surgery will remove the blockage.

To best compare to tubal surgery, let’s learn a bit more about IVF. Using various resources around the web including the NY Times and CNN, you can find that one cycle of IVF will be $10,000 to $12,000. During this cycle, you will be given a course of drugs to boost your egg producing ability and to prepare your body. The eggs are gathered and then fertilized. At the appointed time of development, they are placed in your uterus where you will hope one or more implants itself.

Now, some women are just too old to do this. I read in the New York Times of a 49 year old bride who wanted children. In this case, eggs can be bought from an egg donor usually a woman in her 20s. But your body must still be made ready with hormones and drugs for the implantation of the fertilized egg.

But just because you get eggs somewhere else or you are able to use your own, doesn’t mean you will actual become pregnant. The egg(s) have to implant themselves and remain so to term. Unfortunately, this usually doesn’t happen on the first or even the second round of IVF. In fact the average number of cycles you have to go through for a successful pregnancy is three.

Failure of one cycle means another cycle if you are using IVF. You are going to pay for another cycle. You are going to go through at least some of the drugs again. Who knows how many times you will go through this and who knows how much it will cost in the end?

Tubal surgery, however, goes in and removes the section of blocked tubes. The rest of the tube that is not blocked is sutured together giving you a good chance to become pregnant again. This is the same surgery done in tubal ligation reversal where the burned or clipped area is removed and the good sections sewn together. One surgery and you don’t have to pay any more for failures to get pregnant in any one month.

Usually women want to know the success rate when they look at tubal surgery. Funny they don’t ask when it comes to IVF but we’ll provide the data here. Using a study of one doctor’s tubal surgery patients in 2007, we can find it is successful in up to 87% of women. There are factors that affect that rate which you should go study yourself. For IVF, we see that the success rate of any one cycle is 30% which is still much lower than the tubal surgery success rates even among women in their late 40s and early 50s. This makes tubal surgery a better option than IVF for women who suffer tubal blockage.