Ladies, your clock really is ticking: 88% of eggs lost by age 30

In the Let’s Start Encouraging Young Folks to Marry and Procreate Sooner department, we have this from The London Telegraph:

The new research by the Univeristy of St Andrews and Edinburgh University is the first to colate the actual decline of the “ovarian reserve” – the potential number of eggs women are born with – from conception to the menopause. It shows that on average women are born with 300,000 potential egg cells but this pool declines at a much faster rate than first thought. By the age of 30 there is only 12 per cent left on average and by the age of 40 just three per cent.

Dr Hamish Wallace, the co-author, said: “Our model shows that for 95 per cent of women, by the age of 30 years, only 12% of their maximum ovarian reserve is present, and by the age of 40 years only three per cent remains.”

Best to set aside the “it’s better to have kids after college and career” myth right away, don’t you think?

HT: Ladies, your clock really is ticking: 88% of eggs lost by age 30

Heather MacDonald on Reengineering the Family

Heather MacDonald on Reengineering the Family

An atheist (or agnostic?) writer I find worth reading even when I disagree, since she often raises good questions and makes sharp points:

Indeed, heterosexual demand drove the medical revolution that allows gays to procreate. Infertile heterosexual couples unwilling to accept a biological limit in their lives spurred the ever-increasing array of gamete- and womb-swapping technologies that now includes sperm banks and complicated surrogacy arrangements. Unmarried middle-aged women, similarly unwilling to give up their assumed right to have it all, have also provided a market for revolutionary fertility techniques. Gays have merely piggybacked on procedures that heterosexuals created for themselves.

My question: If engineering is what we are talking about, who has the right and authority to do the reengineering?

HT: Mere Comments