A cycle of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), locally valorized as a “modern cure” for infertility, is nevertheless more likely to result in failure than success. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Turkish IVF clinic and qualitative interviews with patients and practitioners, this paper explores the practical and discursive strategies used to negotiate this potential dichotomy, as well as the range of causal inferences made to understand and explain treatment outcomes. These strategies not only reveal particular local formulations between science and religion, or accountability and fate, but also, consequently, facilitate particular types of relationships between doctors and their patients. For example, both patients and practitioners place great emphasis on close adherence to doctors’ orders during the IVF cycle, not just on matters regarding the dosage of medication and timing of clinical visits, but also on less “medical” matters, such as which foods or activities to abstain from. Yet, doctors’ actions, knowledge, and powers on their own are recognized as insufficient to guarantee a pregnancy. Scientific and medical explanations fail to provide clear answers, and cannot satisfactorily elucidate why, despite exact replication, IVF will sometimes “work” but often will not. Thus, both patients and practitioners reference a range of other factors – including patients’ “psychology” or “energy” – as also influential to the treatment outcome, and will speculate regarding potential contributing reasons to the success and failure of particular cases. Most importantly, however, the outcome of IVF is seen as determined by the will of Allah, with the concept of “hay?r” (which can only loosely be translated as “auspiciousness” or “beneficence”) forming a central theme in both religious and secular narratives. This fatalistic attitude is reflexively assessed by both patients and practitioners as beneficial, both for enabling a more relaxed attitude during the treatment process and for providing a coping strategy for those faced with disappointments.