- 27 Babies
- 07 Women
Age and Fertility
In today’s society, age-related infertility is becoming more common. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) approximately 20% of women wait until after age 35 to begin their families. Several factors have contributed to this trend: 1) contraception is readily available; 2) more women are in the work force; 3) women are marrying at an older age; 4) the divorce rate remains high; 5) married couples are delaying pregnancy until they are more financially secure; and 6) many women don’t realize that their fertility begins to decline in their late 20s or early 30s.
In addition, stories in the media may lead you to believe that you can delay getting pregnant and then use assisted reproductive technologies (ART) to get pregnant when you’re ready. However, age affects the success rates of infertility treatments as well as your natural ability to get pregnant. For example, if you are a healthy 30-year-old woman, you have about a 20% chance per month to get pregnant. By age 40, however, your chance is only about 5% per month. In many cases, these percentages are true for natural conception as well as conception using ART.
It is important to remember that your fertility decreases with age, particularly after age 35 Even though women today are healthier and taking better care of themselves than ever before, improved health in later life does not offset the natural age-related decline in fertility.
As you age, your fertility declines due to normal, age-related changes that occur in your ovaries. You are born with all the eggs that you will ever have in your ovaries, unlike men who continue to produce sperm their entire lives. Even though you have over a million eggs in your ovaries at birth, you only have about 300,000 eggs left by the time you reach puberty. Of the eggs remaining at puberty, only about 300 will be ovulated during your entire reproductive years and the rest will undergo atresia. Atresia is a degenerative process that occurs regardless of whether you are pregnant, have normal menstrual cycles, use birth control, or are undergoing infertility treatment. Smoking appears to accelerate atresia and is linked to earlier menopause.
During your reproductive years, your ovaries ovulate (release) an egg each month. If the egg is fertilized and implants in the lining of your uterus (endometrium), you become pregnant. If you do not become pregnant, the endometrial lining that thickened with blood in preparation for a pregnancy is shed in the form of the menstrual flow, and the cycle begins again.