If there is any silver lining to the octuplet fiasco it would have to be that infertility patients are now better informed about the tremendous disparity between IVF facilities. Elizabeth Cohen of CNN has a very informative article available online about how patients can avoid selecting their very own Dr. Victor Frankenstein as their fertility specialist.

Among the sensible advice offered in the article:

So, before you select a fertility doctor, do your homework. Start by clicking on the CDC’s Fertility Clinic Reports page to find information for a fertility clinic you’re interested in. Look for the line “percentage of cycles resulting in live births.” This tells you how often a clinic was able to achieve a live birth, or in layman’s terms, the clinic’s “success rate.”

Farther down, the line “percentage of pregnancies with triplets or more” lets you know how often a clinic had a pregnancy with high-order multiples. “Anything more than a singleton or twins is risky,” Miller says. “Even twins have higher risks of having health and developmental problems. People go to the shopping mall and see double strollers and say, ‘Oh, how cute.’ They don’t see the ones who aren’t able to leave the house.”

You can compare an individual clinic’s rates with the national average on the CDC’s page with national fertility statistics..