Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART): IVF, ZIFT and GIFT

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) are a set of medical procedures developed specifically to help couples who are unable to conceive naturally, and who have not achieved a pregnancy through simpler medical or surgical treatment of an identified cause of infertility (Section 3.7). The WBCHSE syllabus asks only for an elementary, general-awareness level understanding of three such procedures, each suited to a somewhat different situation.

IN VITRO FERTILISATION (IVF), widely and popularly known as the 'test-tube baby' technique — though the fertilised egg actually develops briefly in a laboratory dish, not literally in a test tube — involves collecting mature ova from the woman's ovary (usually after hormonal stimulation so that more than the usual single egg becomes available in that cycle) and sperm from the male partner, and bringing the two together outside the body, in carefully controlled laboratory conditions designed to resemble the natural environment as closely as possible so that fertilisation can take place. Once fertilisation has occurred and the resulting embryo has developed to an early stage over the following few days, it is transferred back into the woman's body to continue developing — either directly into the uterus, or, in certain cases, into a fallopian tube.

ZYGOTE INTRA-FALLOPIAN TRANSFER (ZIFT) refers specifically to this second option: an early-stage embryo (zygote), formed outside the body in the laboratory in essentially the same way as for IVF, is transferred not into the uterus but into the woman's fallopian tube, provided the tube is healthy and open. From there, the embryo travels down the tube on its own and implants in the uterine lining much as it would after a natural fertilisation, rather than being placed in the uterus directly by the physician.

GAMETE INTRA-FALLOPIAN TRANSFER (GIFT) is conceptually different from both of the above, because no fertilisation takes place outside the body at all. It is used chiefly for a woman who is unable to produce ova of her own but who has an otherwise normal, healthy uterus fully capable of supporting a pregnancy. In GIFT, an ovum obtained from a donor is transferred, together with sperm from the recipient woman's own partner, directly into the recipient's fallopian tube, so that fertilisation and the earliest stages of embryonic development happen naturally inside her body, exactly as they would after ordinary conception, rather than in a laboratory dish. …