Fertility Solutions

If you are trying to fall pregnant — or preparing for IVF — and you are taking a GLP-1 medication like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Saxenda or Rybelsus, you are not alone in feeling uncertain. More and more South African fertility patients are asking the same questions: Should I stop? Is it safe? Will it help me conceive? Will my doctor refuse to treat me until I lose weight?

Somewhere in a laboratory right now, under a microscope powerful enough to resolve a single cell, an embryologist could be making a decision that changes your family forever.

They work in near-silence, in a carefully controlled environment where temperature, pH, and humidity are monitored to decimal-point precision. In front of them, suspended in a drop of culture medi...

Let me set the scene.

I am at a family wedding. Indian wedding, so picture six hundred people, ninety-seven aunties, four marquees, a buffet that could feed Phoenix for a week, and one Priya in a sari trying to refill her plate at the dessert station without being intercepted.

I was intercepted.

“Beta,” says Auntie Saroj, who is not my actual aunti...