Everyone knows that a woman’s eggs don’t improve with age. The arbiter of turn-of-the-millennium pop culture, “Sex and the City,” gave us the image of the single woman in her mid-30s (Miranda) and her maturing eggs. And while fertility may not quite fall off a cliff at 35, it’s hard for women to ignore the idea that things are getting worse as they get older. Obstetricians have a special category for pregnant women over 35: “advanced maternal age.”
Tag: eggs
Italy Court Rules Ban on Sperm Donors ‘Unlawful’
Italy’s constitutional court on Wednesday ruled that a ban on the use of donor sperm and eggs, which forms part of the country’s restrictive law on fertility treatment, is “unlawful” and “unconstitutional”.
New Understanding of Why Chromosome Errors are High in Women’s Eggs
A new study from the University of Southampton has provided scientists with a better understanding of why chromosome errors are high in women’s eggs. It is estimated that up to 60 per cent of eggs are affected by errors in how their chromosomes divide, making it the leading cause of infertility. Chromosome errors also lead to conditions such as Down Syndrome and early pregnancy loss.
Newly Identified Small-RNA Pathway Defends Genome Against the Enemy Within
Reproductive cells, such as an egg and sperm, join to form stem cells that can mature into any tissue type. But how do reproductive cells arise? We humans are born with all of the reproductive cells that we will ever produce. But in plants things are very different. They first generate mature, adult cells and only later “reprogram” some of them to produce eggs and sperm.
Why Ob-Gyns May Be the Worst People to Talk to About Fertility
This week the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released an opinion saying that women’s ability to have babies decreases gradually but significantly beginning around age 32 and then goes down more rapidly after age 37. The younger estimate may come as a shock to women who have long been conditioned that 35 is the “I’ve got to deal with this!” age and that 40 is the cut-off for either freezing your eggs or giving your on-the-fence man an ultimatum.
Frozen Donor Eggs Helping Couples Conceive
The use of frozen donor eggs is expanding the options for couples struggling with infertility. Now that the technology is approved for mainstream use, it’s cutting the cost and the time it takes to conceive.
Egg Donor IRS Challenge Offers Future Sperm Tax Certainty
To Nichelle Perez, the $20,000 she received for donating her eggs for fertility treatments was a tax-exempt payment for pain and suffering.Not so, said the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which considers it income.
Transgender People Are Having Kids All Kinds of Ways; Doctors Need to Get Used to It
As more of the estimated 700,000 transgender people in the United States explore new ways to make families, we’re likely to see even more mixes of reproductive parts and social and gender identities of people and their partners—never mind the sperm, eggs, or wombs contributed by third parties.
The Fertility Doctor: Beating the Biological Clock — The Fertility Profile
Do you want a baby someday, but you aren’t ready yet? Perhaps you are building your career, looking for the right partner, or enjoying some one-on-one time with your love before jumping onto the baby bandwagon? “Of course I have plenty of time,” you’re probably thinking, but the truth is, women only have a finite number of eggs and their numbers drop steadily from the time a girl is born.
Egg Donation Enabled Me to Have the Family I Had Longed For
In the past, women with poor-quality or scarce eggs would have had to accept that they’d never have a baby, or else start thinking about adoption.But these days there’s another increasingly popular option — egg donation.