Preserving Your Fertility

A woman is born with approximately two million eggs in her ovaries. By her teenage years, this number is reduced to about 400,000. She will subsequently lose about one thousand eggs each month, until eventually no eggs remain. At that point, she begins menopause. The pace of this inexorable loss of eggs as a woman gets older is not affected by birth control pills, pregnancies, nutritional supplements, healthy living, or youthful appearance.

The ticking of her ovarian biological clock, and not knowing where she is on that biological clock, is one of the biggest dilemmas every woman faces

Most women (98%) are fertile through their early twenties. Yet by their mid thirties, the infertility rate increases to almost 30%. This phenomenon, referred to as the “biological clock”, is a direct result of the limited egg supply with which each woman is born.

Where are you on your biological clock? Many of the methods currently used to determine a woman's fertility are incorrect, and can lead to useless (and costly) ‘treatments’. These ineffective fertility tests generally fail to address the major factor in the decline of a woman's fertility: the aging of her ovaries.

Assessing where you are on your particular biological clock has always been like peering into a black box.

Some women remain fertile well into their forties, while others lose their fertility in their early twenties. Some of us have to face unexpected disease (like cancer, the treatment of which, though it can save your life, threatens to wreck your chances to have children). We all simply have to face age, as we are pressured to put off pregnancy by unexpected turns of career and marriage. You have your life and your career, which in the modern world may mean putting off childbearing, but nonetheless you do want eventually to have children.

Fortunately, there are now three new technologies to address this dilemma. They are called Antral Follicle Count (AFC), Ovarian Tissue Freezing, and Egg Freezing.