About The Fertility Record
Every U.S. fertility clinic that reports to the CDC is on this site, with the outcomes it filed, in every age band — not just the flattering one. 382 of the 452 are scored under a published method that no clinic can pay into.
Why this exists
Federal law already makes fertility clinics report their own results. The CDC publishes all of it — clinic by clinic, age band by age band, every year. It is free, it is complete, and almost nobody uses it, because it arrives as a spreadsheet rather than as an answer to the question a patient is actually asking.
Meanwhile the pages that are easy to find are written by people selling the treatment. A clinic quotes the number that flatters it. A directory ranks whoever paid. Someone deciding where to spend $15,000 to $25,000 of their own money, on something that may not work, deserves better than that, and the data to do better already exists.
So this site does one thing: it publishes the federal record in a form you can use, shows its arithmetic, and tells you plainly where the data cannot answer your question. There is a lot of that last part. The honest answer to "which clinic is best for me" is frequently "the registry does not say," and a site that could never bring itself to tell you that would not be worth reading.
Who makes it
Rich Shea
Founder and editor
I build data-first web properties — sites that take a public record nobody has turned into a product and make it usable. I have done it in other categories before this one, which mainly taught me how these projects go wrong: the data is never as clean as it looks, a status column is not a yes-or-no, and the temptation to round a number in your own favor turns up early and often.
This one started with a straightforward observation. The most consequential dataset the federal government publishes about a cash-pay medical decision — every clinic's own reported outcomes, every year, by patient age — was sitting essentially unread, because it ships as a spreadsheet and the people who would benefit most from it are not going to open a spreadsheet at the worst moment of their year.
I am not a physician and nothing here is medical advice. The expertise this site claims is narrow and specific: reading the federal registry accurately, scoring it by a method published in advance, and saying so when the data will not support a conclusion. Every figure traces to a CDC filing you can look up yourself, which is the point — you are not being asked to trust me, you are being shown the arithmetic.
Medical review
This site does not currently carry a named clinical reviewer, and it says so here rather than leaving you to assume one. Recruiting a reproductive endocrinologist or embryologist to review the explanatory pages is work in progress. Until that person exists and is named on this page, nothing here is described as medically reviewed — claiming a review that did not happen would be a worse failure than not having one.
How this is funded
Stated plainly, because a site that grades clinics and takes money from them owes you this:
- Clinics can pay for a fuller profile — photos, bios, services — and for clearly labeled placement. Both are flat monthly fees set in advance. Details are on the clinic page, with the prices in public.
- One sponsor slot, clearly labeled, never a clinic, never inside a list of results. See advertising.
- Data licensing to employers and benefits teams who have to build and defend a clinic network.
What is not for sale, at any price: a rank, a score, a position in a result list, or a followed link. Nothing is priced per lead, per patient or per booking — not as a preference, but because paying for patient referrals is a legal problem in healthcare regardless of who pays the bill. Appearing on this site is free and always will be; so is claiming your listing, including the link to your own website.
The site holds no ownership interest in any fertility clinic. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this site the day it changes, alongside the ranking method, rather than being something you have to find out.
Getting it wrong
This site will contain errors, and the useful question is what happens then. Corrections are published rather than quietly edited — you can read the corrections log, including the ones nobody asked us to make. If a figure here does not match your own CDC filing, or we have matched the wrong record to your clinic, tell us: [email protected]. That is true whether or not you have ever paid us anything.
Contact
[TK — postal address required] A commercial message
needs a valid physical postal address under CAN-SPAM, and this site sells
sponsorships and clinic tiers. A PO box is fine; a fake one is not. Set
commercial.postalAddress in site.config.json and
this block renders the address instead. The newsletter cannot be sent
until it is set.