Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Baby Boom Baby Bust - After seven years of tears, a childless couple ponders next step

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After seven years of tears, a childless couple ponders next step (Pt. 3)

	We invest so much time, pain and money on these procedures and when it doesn't seem to be working, it gets very frustrating! I just want it to work. One time. That's all I'm asking. I would go to the end of the Earth and back to make this dream come true.
	--Stephanie Brant, writing Jan. 16, five days before her last insemination.

Easter of 1996 was special for the Brants.They conceived.

Not with any drugs. Not with any artificial insemination. Not with any doctors and nurses around under bright lights, in a busy atmosphere, processing sperm brought in a sterile container from home, hidden inside a brown lunchbag.

No, the Brants became pregnant the old-fashioned way, in their bedroom. But in an examination after 8 1/2 weeks, Pelekanos could find no trace of a fetal heartbeat. Something unexplained had gone wrong with the Brants' best chance at a baby. Pelekanos had to scrape Stephanie's uterine cavity and remove what was left of the fetal tissue.

Devastated, Stephanie gave away almost everything she'd been saving for years for her baby: the clothes, the crib, blankets, bumpers, curtains.

It's curious why they conceived that time and not others. Pelekanos had performed recent laparoscopic surgery on Stephanie's ovaries, after she'd been in pain and failing to ovulate regularly. That no doubt helped, but she had similar surgeries before without conceiving afterward.

"There's science, and then there's the unexplainable about this stuff," Pelekanos readily acknowledges. He says Stephanie's fallopian tubes are normal, which makes her a viable mother-to-be even though her ovaries and uterus are scarred.

The Brants' Easter conception is part of what keeps them going, and why Pelekanos doesn't totally discourage them, though he also has recommended they pursue in vitro fertilization. Dr. Anthony Wakim at Allegheny General Hospital advised in vitro when Stephanie visited the reproductive endocrinologist last year at Pelekanos' urging, but they've declined so far.


One week before her insemination, Stephanie Brant watches as Dr. Michael Pelekanos points on an ultrasound monitor to the follicle growing inside her.

Their insurance coverage through WABCO covers most of the costs of an intrauterine insemination cycle but not in vitro, which is generally $7,000 to $10,000. There are no published success rates for IUI, but they're assumed to be less than those of in vitro, which produced babies about one in five times for women trying it in 1995.

"We can't afford it," Stephanie says of in vitro. Brian is a computer programmer, and they have a modest middle-class existence from their incomes. Most couples gambling on in vitro without insurance coverage do so with either higher incomes or with the backing of more affluent parents than the Brants have.

So they keep revisiting Pelekanos. And they seek other potential help by praying together most nights before going to bed. They thought another religious holiday might do the trick, so they had intercourse on Christmas Eve.

No pregnancy resulted. Sometimes, it's hard to keep faith.

"You see on a TV screen that God gave someone a baby, and they left it behind in a bathroom, and you wonder, 'Why did God do that for them and not us?' " Brian says.