Welcoming the first babies from Penn Fertility in Lancaster

When Ashlee Rineer and her wife Lauren began fertility treatments in 2020, they were driving back and forth to Radnor, Pennsylvania-about 75 minutes each way before they started their workdays-multiple times a week. The couple lives in Lancaster, where Ashlee works at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health as a health promotion specialist in Community Wellness.

The young family says it was worth driving to Penn Medicine Radnor because it helped them achieve their dream of parenthood. But not having a practice closer to home to receive the treatments they needed was burdensome.

For their second child, those long drive times were history. That's because two years ago, to meet the needs of the patients in south-central Pennsylvania, Penn Medicine opened a Penn Fertility Care location in Lancaster. The new clinic allows patients outside of the Philadelphia metro area equal access to the full range of Penn Fertility services and treatments, while staying close to home.

The Lancaster practice is the first and only fertility clinic in Lancaster County that has an embryology lab, where patients can go through egg retrieval or embryo transfer as part of a course of in vitro fertilization. Patients in the past would have had to travel to Radnor or Philadelphia to access the full breadth of these treatments. The clinic also offers a suite of other fertility services like intrauterine insemination, monitoring, ultrasounds and lab work.

Since the first patients started coming to the Lancaster location, the patients and employees are now celebrating their first babies being born through the practice.

While Ashlee and Lauren, and other LGBTQ+ couples, come into treatment knowing the pathway they will need to pursue to build a family, many couples come to the practice due to infertility; they have been trying to build a family but haven't been successful in doing so.

This story is by Olivia Kimmel. Read more at Penn Medicine News.