Australia

In Australia, professional guidelines recommending single embryo transfer (SET) for women under 35 are being more widely implemented.

• Policy
  Fertility Society of Australia guidance requires all centres to minimise the incidence of multiple births following IVF and to transfer no more than two embryos to women under 40 years. It also recommends that women under 35 years on their first fresh treatment have no more than one embryo transferred.

        It has recently been proposed that guidance should be further tightened and that professionals
        should recommend to patients that no more than one embryo be transferred in the first treatment
        cycle where the woman is under 35. These proposals have not yet been implemented although
        the evidence suggests that these guidelines are being more widely adopted.

• Result
  There seems to be a trend towards SET among most assisted reproductive technology (ART) units. A report on assisted reproduction from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) and the Fertility Society of Australia shows that SET cycles accounted for 48.3% of embryo transfer cycles in 2005, compared with 28.4% in 2002 . In 2005, 86.0% of deliveries following embryo transfer cycles were singleton deliveries, the highest proportion ever reported.
  
  By 2006, more than half (57%) of all embryo transfers were single embryo transfers. The evidence also seems to show that reducing the number of embryos transferred does not reduce the pregnancy rate, but does reduce the multiple pregnancy rate.
  
  For more information, see the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare website.