fertility

Her birth is a milestone that follows years of struggles to legalize IVF and offer it within the Costa Rica Social Security System (CCSS, or Caja). 

The parents are from the province of Heredia who had the IVF procedure performed last June at a private hospital in San José.

The executive decree reinstating the right to in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Costa Rica went into effect three months ago. But just one private clinic has applied and received authorization to perform the fertility procedure.

Gabriel González, the youngest of Costa Rica’s first set of sextuplets, who were born premature in May, died Saturday night in San José’s Hospital de la Mujer.

Fifteen years after the Supreme Court banned the fertility procedure, in vitro fertilization could be legal in Costa Rica as early as Friday.

New guidelines proposed by the Human Fertility Commission have been approved to increase the chances of having a single baby rather than multiples through artificial insemination to 90 percent.

The fertility rate of Costa Rican women was 1.76 children in 2013, the lowest rate in the country’s history and the fifth consecutive year below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, according to an official source.

The San José-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a ruling Thursday night against the government of Costa Rica condemning its ban on in vitro fertilization. The court ordered the country to legalize the practice, which was outlawed in March 2000 by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, or Sala IV.