Good News For Those Of Us Who Have Gone Through An Ectopic Pregnancy

A couple years before I conceived my first child, I suffered through an ectopic pregnancy. It was one of those things I knew nothing about, apart from the horror stories I had heard about how you could die if it wasn’t treated quickly enough. I remember being really relieved when they were able to treat me non-surgically. Something about removing a fallopian tube made it seem like it would be even harder to get pregnant. I was already having a hard enough time.

Well, it turns out that if you experience an ectopic pregnancy, you have a pretty good chance of becoming pregnant again – whether you were treated surgically or not. A study of over 400 women in France, two years after they had given birth shed an interesting light on how similar fertility rates are for women who had been treated surgically and non-surgically for their ectopic pregnancies:

This study looked at pregnancies among more than 400 women in France two years after their ectopic pregnancy had been treated using one of three methods: methotrexate injection to halt the pregnancy; conservative surgery, which preserves the fallopian tube; and radical surgery, which removes the fallopian tube.

Pregnancy rates two years after treatment were 67 percent among women who received methotrexate, about 70 percent among those who had conservative surgery and 64 percent among those who had radical surgery.

I don’t know how everyone else fared after their ectopic, but it took us two years to get pregnant. There was no medical evidence backing me up, but I was convinced the methotrexate somehow screwed my chances at becoming pregnant again. I guess when you are going through a period of infertility it is natural to want to have some explanation as to why? But the results of this study reaffirm that for most women, fertility returns and a healthy in-utero pregnancy is possible:

“This … is good news for women who have had an ectopic pregnancy. It gives confidence that women treated for ectopic pregnancy, whether with surgery or with medication, have high rates of fertility after treatment,” Makarov said. “The majority of women who desired to become pregnant after treatment for an ectopic pregnancy were able to do so, and most of these pregnancies were located in the uterus.”

(photo: mast3r/ Shutterstock.com)