Featuring MSFC's Member, Nicholas Kummer, medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) can be life-changing. I know, because it’s the reason I exist.

My parents met later in life, so they knew starting a family might be challenging—and they were right. After three miscarriages, they looked into other options. First, they tried intrauterine insemination (IUI), a procedure in which sperm is placed directly into the uterus using a small catheter; when that didn’t work, they tried IVF, a procedure that involves removing eggs from the ovaries and combining them with sperm in a laboratory dish to create a fertilized embryo that is then transferred back into the uterus in the hopes of a pregnancy. The first round of IVF didn’t work for my parents, but the second one did. Nine months later, I was born…