Did you know there is an alternative to IVF and that it is tubal surgery? Whether this type of an operation will work for you depends upon the reason for your infertility. However, you should definitely be aware that IVF is not the only recourse for infertility. Tubal surgery can be your answer instead.

What type of infertility problems does tubal surgery help with? One of the leading causes of infertility is tubal blockage of some type. Many times brought on by disease, the tubal blockage prevents the egg from reaching the uterus. Tubal surgery will remove the blockage.

Consider these interesting facts using the New York Times and CNN and resources. A course or cycle of IVF can cost you around $10,000 to $12,000. The time involved in one cycle can be three to eight weeks while they try to boost your hormones to cause you to super ovulate. When you do, you will produce several eggs which will be retrieved in order to do fertilization outside your body before being implanted in your uterus.

Now, some women are just too old to do this. I read in the New York Times of a 49 year old bride who wanted children. In this case, eggs can be bought from an egg donor usually a woman in her 20s. But your body must still be made ready with hormones and drugs for the implantation of the fertilized egg.

But just because you get eggs somewhere else or you are able to use your own, doesn't mean you will actual become pregnant. The egg(s) have to implant themselves and remain so to term. Unfortunately, this usually doesn't happen on the first or even the second round of IVF. In fact the average number of cycles you have to go through for a successful pregnancy is three.

Now you have to go through it all again who knows how many times. You have to pay for each cycle you will go through. Usually you can count on more than one cycle with all the cost, time and potential damage done to your body.

Tubal surgery, however, goes in and removes the section of blocked tubes. The rest of the tube that is not blocked is sutured together giving you a good chance to become pregnant again. This is the same surgery done in tubal ligation reversal where the burned or clipped area is removed and the good sections sewn together. One surgery and you don't have to pay any more for failures to get pregnant in any one month.

Usually women want to know the success rate when they look at tubal surgery. Funny they don't ask when it comes to IVF but we'll provide the data here. Using a study of one doctor's tubal surgery patients in 2007, we can find it is successful in up to 87% of women. There are factors that affect that rate which you should go study yourself. For IVF, we see that the success rate of any one cycle is 30% which is still much lower than the tubal surgery success rates even among women in their late 40s and early 50s. This makes tubal surgery a better option than IVF for women who suffer tubal blockage.