For women who know they want to have kids, that’s a pretty grim thought, but it turns out to be even worse than that: We lose hundreds or even a thousand eggs per month through a process that’s like programmed cell death, says Owen Davis, MD, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM). And even if you’re preventing ovulation with the pill or an IUD, those unreleased eggs don’t stick around — they die.