Women today are waiting longer and longer to have children. For some it is because they are trying to focus on their career before they settle down and have a family. Others are waiting because they want to be financially stable. Some women just haven’t found the right person to have a baby with yet. The problem is that the older a woman gets the riskier it is for her to get pregnant and it becomes much harder to conceive.
A new study that has been released by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine states that after the age of 37 a woman’s fertility drops considerably. After that the numbers become worse. By the time a woman is 43 she will 10 times less of a chance of conceiving a child than she did 6 years before. Data was collected from over 200 women that were part of a study. They looked at how many eggs the women had to drop before they had one that was healthy enough to become a baby.
At the age of 37 the researchers found that a woman would have to go through four egg drops before she had one that may be viable enough to become an embryo. In a normal month a woman will drop one egg. That means that there are only three times per year that a 37 year old woman may have an egg that is good enough for fertilization. Just three times a year. Once every four months. The news is worse for women who are over 42. At the age of 43 they found that women needed to go through roughly 44 egg drops before they had a viable one. That equals out to almost four years of cycles before they may have one egg that can be fertilized. One try in four years is not a very big window at all.
Due to these dismal numbers women are now taking to cryogenically freezing their eggs so that should they want to become pregnant down the road they will have healthy eggs that they can use. The problem is however that everything needs to be just right for an egg to be fertilized so it could still be a long time before they are able to conceive. It is also very costly just to freeze the eggs. The price tag can range from $6,000 to $15,000.
