“My doctor said it’s my age and poor egg quality.”

“Most likely it’s my egg quality.”

“They can’t find anything wrong, so it must be my egg quality.”

Does age make a difference?  Yes, generally the younger we are, the easier it is to sustain a full term pregnancy.  But the story of our fertility and “infertility” is far more complex than the story of “egg quality.”

If it’s all about age, then how about the women whose stories populate the FertileHeart Testimonial Pages. Stories of Mandy, who was 4 years older, or Gen who was 8 years older or Sarah who was also 8 years older, or many other women who conceived spontaneously after years of failed treatment. Or stories of women whose IVF finally worked after years of failed attempts. Were they not  5,7,8 years older than when they first started trying?

The constant stream of messaging about our waning ovarian reserve and our egg quality turns us into objects that need to be quality controlled. Subjects that need a quality controller’s approval.

Nine out of ten women I’ve worked with who are now happily raising their families have been cautioned about their “old eggs.” I myself have been told that not only did I have hopelessly poor ovarian reserve and IVF was no longer an option for me. My daughter showed up a few months before my 45th birthday.

When an authority figure trained to see us through the lens of data, data that leaves out the ten thousand variables that make up the complex being we are, we can accept their assessment as reality or run our very own experiment.  We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.