Going back to the issue of fertility from the beginning of the thread: it turns out that much of the hysteria about rapidly declining fertility after 35 is based on......French birth record from 1680 to 1830. Yep.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-long-can-you-wait-to-have-a-baby/309374/
Yes, everyone will jump in with anecdotes about people they know who waited too long and had trouble conceiving....but this is MMM, we base our decisions on data not anecdotes. And you're academically trained, so you can read the research yourself if you want to. You probably shouldn't wait too long, but no need for panic about biological clocks just yet.
That article is woefully underinformed. I read it when it came out and rolled my eyes. Its basic message is "Hey, check it out, you can probably still get pregnant!" But the biggest problem as women age is not getting pregnant. The biggest problem is getting pregnant with a HEALTHY child and STAYING pregnant long enough to deliver it. Under 30, only 8% (1/12) of pregnancies end in miscarriage. By age 35-37 that figure has doubled;
at 38-39 almost 1/4 of pregnancies end in miscarriage; and even at 40-41, which is not crazy-old by most people's standards, ONE IN THREE pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Here's a link:
http://www.advancedfertility.com/age-miscarriage.htmBut I think
the most telling statistic is what happens to fertile women who do IVF due to male-factor infertility. Let me translate that: many perfectly fertile women do IVF because their husbands have a low sperm count, bad sperm morphology or whatever. And because almost all IVF clinics in the country report their data in great detail to the CDC, you can see what happens to such women as they age. Here's a link:
http://www.sart.org/find_frm.htmlClick on National Data Summary (or see if this link works to take you straight there:
https://www.sartcorsonline.com/rptCSR_PublicMultYear.aspx?ClinicPKID=0).
Now look at that page. There's a drop-down menu near the top called "Diagnosis," which by default is set to "All Diagnoses." Change it to "Male Factor"--this will show you the stats for FERTILE women who do IVF solely because their husbands have a sperm problem. And if you look at the "number of cycles" line near the top, you'll see that what we're talking about here is almost 20,000 IVF cycles--not a small sample by any means. And what do we see? This:
- For fertile women under 35, the percentage of cycles (IVF attempts) that result in a live birth is 43.2%.
- For fertile women 35-37, it drops to 36.7%.
- For fertile women 38-40, it drops to 25.6%.
- For fertile women 41-42, it drops to 16.6%.
- For fertile women over 42, the success rate is a piddling 5.2%.
And those are the success rates for
fertile women,
when doctors are putting the sperm and eggs together and transferring live embryos into the womb--usually
multiple live embryos, by the way: look at the line "Average number of embryos transferred." It's 1.9 embryos for women under 35, rising to 3.1 and 3.4 for women in their 40s. Even putting 3.4 live embryos in the womb of a fertile woman over 42 only gives her a 5.2% chance of having a baby! So what do you suppose the chances of a baby are when such a woman doesn't have doctors helping her produce a ton of eggs, make embryos and put them in the right place, but just releases her usual one egg per month and has sex at the right time? Way the hell lower, obviously. And remember, these are the numbers for women
who do not have any fertility problems themselves. What do you suppose the chances are for women who DO have such problems?
So yeah, no, I'm not dealing in anecdotes here. And in case someone is tempted to come back with anecdotes about all the famous women and Hollywood actresses who've had babies at 46 or 48 or 50, the statistics tell us that 95%+ of those women (and 100% of those 48 and up) must have used egg donors.