This is an article that you need to read critically, beyond the headline.
Even a few paragraphs down they say this:
> The optimal age to freeze eggs varies depending on the source and metric, but almost all sources agree it's sometime between 19 and 26.
So there's some heavy bias inserted already into the title.
The next chart shows a peak around 19, but if you read the fine print it's not a chart about eggs at all. The subtitle says it shows:
> probability of getting pregnant for couples not on birth control
Not the quality of eggs frozen. They're saying one thing in text and showing a chart of something else. If you can't imagine why couples in their early 20s might have a higher rate of pregnancy than couples in their 50s then you might want to think a little deeper about the factors that go into that.
The writeup then goes into polygenic embryo screening, which then jumps to improving IQ by selecting embryos, which gets to their final argument which is that it's easier to collect more eggs when younger. So freezing a lot of eggs when you're younger allows for more boosting of your child's IQ through genetic screening based on a company called Herasight's data. Herasight has been widely criticized for overselling their abilities. Also, why do so many rationalist writeups end up back at a conversation about genetics and IQ?
This article is answering a different question to what it is asking. It's asking "What is the most effective strategy to freeze your eggs if you're absolutely certain you will need to".
The reason women freeze their eggs in their early 30s is because they still have a good chance for it to be effective and they now have a strong idea they'll need to. You don't have that second piece of information at age 19.
Or to be specific: What is the size of the cohort of women you are expecting to freeze their eggs at the age of 19, who will use those frozen eggs. How many of them will give birth to children without the help of IVF, and how many will choose never to have children.
I think this article is a good example of rationalism. Which is basically getting very mathsy about 1 specific very of the data, without viewing the data in the context of the decision that is being made.
For example, what is the percentage of women you expect to freeze their eggs at age 19, who you then expect to be unable to afford the $500 every year to keep those eggs frozen over the next decade?
Having done IVF with my wife I think this is the most underrated fertility advice available today.
I don't understand why governments of countries with increasing average age and low birth rate don't pay for this for all women. This is one the best pro-family policies that can be implemented.
> This is one the best pro-family policies that can be implemented
Hard disagree on that. You're coming from an angle of someone who wanted to have kids and do it in a mathematically optimal way. A lot of people see egg freezing as a way to delay having kids until they're older, which can become a disincentive to raising families when they're young and healthy enough to do it. If you want a pro-family policy, you should be spending the money on people with families and their children, not on a tool that is used to delay having children in common use.
Another huge problem with this proposal is that freezing eggs is only a small part of the cost. The cost of IVF later in life could push into six figures depending on how many rounds are needed. If we're talking about pro-family policies that can cost upwards of $50,000 to $100,000 per family, there are many more effective places to spend that like on childcare options.
Most 19 year olds probably wouldn't opt into injecting themselves twice a day for weeks and dealing with the side effects of the injections, then the subsequent extraction procedures (likely for multiple rounds) even if it was paid for. Which is reasonable, considering most women who want children will have them without IVF and don't need to go through any of that.
To be clear: I agree that it's not great policy to pressure women into doing this (which, arguably, making egg-freezing free would tend to do), bodily autonomy concerns chief among them. It's also not great policy to withhold this as an option from poor women while allowing rich ones access to it (the status quo). The third option would be to ban it, but that has obvious problems too most notably that womens' reproductive health is already surveilled and politicized enough without adding another new crime to police for around it. Allowing it in certain circumstances (a "medical waiver" or similar) just reproduces that same issues as banning it, and would probably be just a waystation on the way to a full ban.
I've yet to see a good proposal for how to regulate or handle this as a society, so my best guess is that we keep the status quo (it's expensive so only rich people can do it) for the foreseeable future UNLESS it becomes some kind of culture war issue for MAGA, which seems honestly pretty likely. Presumably they would want to ban it, but allow exceptions for certain cases that amount to "but is the patient a married white woman with acceptable politics?" in a more legally palatable form.
That money is better invested in providing affordable family housing. Even if IVF is available no one is going to actually have kids if you do nothing to make it economically sustainable to start a family.
Do we really want to rely on IVF to solve the fact that people can only afford a family home once they're well into their 40s? It's insanity if you ask me.
I went through it with my wife too and expecting a 19 y/o women to go through the IVF process as an insurance policy is a bit insane to me. In our modern, western society, this is age is still solidly childhood with not much definitive thoughts of future family, marriage, etc.
Governments need to make COL more affordable, birth rate will go up naturally
At least with people in my circle of the US, it feels like there's an increasing infantilizing people (frequently themselves), particularly in regards to things like marriage and raising a family. Yet, by 19 you'll have either made decisions for yourself or someone else has for you, that will likely put you on track for your entire future career direction (education, interests, college choice, maybe even enlisted in the military).
You don't need to have given "definitive thought" to your entire future to not be a child anymore.
We definitely need better COL but I'm not convinced it's is the main factor for low birth rates as most countries living in poverty have very high birth rates. I think its a cultural difference that values earlier marriage and heavy family involvement in raising children which, the latter, reduces the stress of having to parent by yourself.
I think there’s a middle ground where in the US many people would be having kids around 30 if they could afford it. Our recent past reflects that. Even the number of kids have been reduced as the cost has become too high, so it’s not parenthood or responsibility alone people are avoiding. Comparing to poverty situations introduces a whole plethora of variables. Kids are seen more as assets than liabilities, as they will care for you in old age and/or can contribute to the household after the first dozen or so years. This is not really a comparison to the rich nations.
We, in the US, don't even have universal day care, or hundreds of other sensible things that would make child-rearing easy/less expensive. Jumping straight to "let's cover expensive IVF programs" is... well a big leap.
I don't see a very big reason mentioned: You might not need it at all. Sure, the optimal age to freeze might be 19, but if 80% of women are done with children by age 30, why would you have every woman spend the equivalent of buying a small car on something they're overwhelmingly not going to need?
Waiting to get a good balance of "your eggs are still reasonably healthy" and "if you haven't had kids until now, it'll probably be a while still" is probably the reason behind the current advice.
Apparently the harvesting procedure typically (but not always?) involves general anesthesia. That alone is never entirely risk-free. In this context, the temporary loss of bodily autonomy could be particularly problematic. All that comes on top of the required hormone treatment. It's not a trivial procedure.
On the other hand, it may be a useful tool to resist expectations to become a mother until it becomes socially acceptable to say no. So it might be important even if the eggs are not getting used.
There's no way it's a worthwhile investment to invest thousands of dollars and take on significant risk and discomfort just for a tool to "resist expectations." You should invest that in a therapist. Or moving to a different state.
If you're curious what it's like for a couple of normies doing IVF, I wrote down our experience here to the degree I remembered: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF
If I'm understanding that right, it cost $25k per run, and you did 3 runs, so $75k total? Or was it $25k for the full thing? Did insurance cover anything?
Our IVF clinic has a publicly available price sheet[0] so that is correct (thought he prices are higher now): $75k total for us. My wife and I are relatively old. Friends who were approximately 10 years younger collected some 50 eggs on a single cycle. There is a drop-off in egg -> embryo but the women with the 50 eggs are likely going to end up with more usable embryos than us.
Insurance coverage is broader now. When we did it, we used cash pay but nowadays where we live in California there is SB 729 that means most big insurance plans will cover IVF. Personally, I think that's a bit regressive. Older, more established couples like us are benefiting from what will be primarily paid into by younger couples. But if pre-implantation testing becomes widespread (a good thing, imho) then IVF will be more widespread so perhaps this is a forward-looking policy. Still, expanding the child tax credit and raising it to 10x what it is would be good, I think.
Didn't read that account but I went through it with wife. The egg collecting / embryo creating process is the expensive part, so depends on how many times you have to do that process. The re-implantation was significantly cheaper, so also depends on how many times you have to do that part but at least its less costly.
We ended up doing 1 extraction and 2 implantations. If I remember it was roughly ($15k-20k) then (~$5k * 2). This was about 8-9 years ago. We had no fertility issues and had other reasons for doing IVF, but if you do have fertility issues it's more risk the extraction and embryo process will fail and need repeating.
I went through this with my partner and it cost around CAD $30K all-in. Thankfully it was 100% covered by insurance (for the drugs) and by a provincial program (for the procedure).
The drugs for stimulating follicle growth cost around $500/day and the first cycle didn't result in enough mature follicles to be worth attempting the egg harvesting. In the second attempt, the duration was extended after a scan to let more develop. Every extra day, is an another $500.
If it weren't for the government program we were seriously looking at going to one of the many clinics in Mexico offering these services.
We weren't so lucky with the numbers though; here's significant attrition at every step and if you aren't starting with a good number it can look like: 5 follicles > 4 mature eggs > 2 embryos > 1 child
It's also the optimal age to not have children! You're still figuring out your life, probably no stable partner or job, time to do some stuff you'll regret later, etc.
If everyone had kids at 18-20, then the grandparents could take care of the grandkids while in their 40s while the parents build their careers from 20-40, then start taking care of the grandkids as the cycle repeats
And then you end up raising your grandkids instead of the kids you gave birth to. It's not something that comes without cost. And what if you don't particularly trust your parents to raise kids? I suppose you would have no idea whether you did or not, because they would not have parented you...
Peoples 40s and 50s are their most productive years. We would be better off just letting people take 10 years off in their twenties - but most people would just party party party (what they do anyway)
It really seems you have no idea what you’re talking about.
I have a couple of friends married for about 4-5 years, with a 4-years old son and a one year old daughter. They both have graduate degrees and stable jobs. They are near 40 years old.
Man, they are two zombies. They are drained. They push forward for the immense love of their kids but it’s incredibly evident they’re drained.
And the thing is… having kids at almost 40 should really be discouraged. They simply don’t have the same energy they had when they were 20, of course. Heck, i’m 33 and it’s evident to me I don’t have the same energy as when I was 23.
This modern idea that one should postpone having kids is incredibly stupid, I hope at some point society will self-correct somehow.
My parents and my spouse's parents were all in their late 30s having children, now we're in the same position due to infertility and now finally going through IVF. We're happy it's working but at the same time it's sad knowing they'll grow up never really knowing their grandparents.
The grandparent situation is sad af. It's also pretty sad being a mid-40s year old dad that doesn't have the energy to keep up with their kid. I pitched a little league game yesterday and it wiped me out. Also, the fact I (and you) will not know our grandchildren very well also is quite sad.
If my son has his first kid the same age I had him, I'll be in my 80s when that kid is starting little league (or that age). Then, factor in the fact that I don't know of any men in my family that have lived past 80 and it gets really grim. They were all heavy smokers and drinkers I remind myself with fingers crossed.
The most sad part for me, is I realized by delaying parenthood - I was just being selfish - and the net result is I minimized "shared time on earth" with the person I love the most. It's easy to say I wouldn't have been a good parent or I wanted X job/income first, but it's all just excuses and selfishness.
If you had kids earlier, you wouldn't get more time with the specific person you love that is your son, you'd get more time with a different son. No doubt you'd love your counterfactual son too. But you shouldn't feel bad for having done any wrong by your real kid. This is the only timeline he could exist in.
Bit of a thorny philosophical argument, maybe, but reasonable in this case.
>by delaying parenthood - I was just being selfish.. I minimized "shared time on earth"
Exactly. My advice to anyone is not wait. If we hadn't, we would have found out sonner that we needed to go through that process. It's not a "wake up and schedule an appointment tomorrow" kind of thing, it's a treatment of last resort and you can burn years trying, going through evaluations and alternatives first.
Since having kids is so tiring in the early years and often lead to a divorce, it is better to have them early when you are still fresh and handle better the lack of sleep, divorce early and then enjoy part time parenthood when you are still youngish.
I feel I am a better parent now that I am sharing custody of my kids and can better balance personal life and hobbies and parenthood.
A cheaper option would be to find someone looking for kids with no romance and agree on having shared parenthood.
I had my kids late in life and I always thought my life experience was a bonus when it came to raising the kids and wrt keeping it together with the wife.
I’m vastly happier having had kids in my 30s rather than my 20s. Greater emotional and financial stability as well as a strong foundation for my marriage were boons.
Employers encouraging egg freezing by offering egg freezing benefits is an abysmal conflict of interest. Employers reap tremendous medium-term benefits and the woman bears all of the long-term risks -- in this case the biggest risk of all .
Employers should be required to pay for future maternity disability care insurance e.g. 2-3 years of maternal leave fully paid, elective at any time, even after they separate from the company. Also disability compensation in the event that fertility fails. e.g. $500k / missed fertility .
That would reveal the true success rate of the procedure. If employers or fertility clinics believed it to be a deterministic process, the risks for the employer would be low.
> Lastly, the stem cells we're planning to use to make these eggs accrue mutations with age, and we don't currently have a good method to fix these before making them into eggs. These mutations will bring additional risk of various serious diseases, only some of which we currently have the genetic screening to detect.
I've always found this one fascinating. Somehow human cells age and humans get old and die but humans can somehow make an entirely new creature through reproduction where that is reset and most of the defects from the parent are gone as well.
How does that work and what stumbling blocks exist that prevent us from replicating it?
I don't know anything about this subject, but I thought it was just natural selection that effectively filtered out the 'bad eggs', as it were. On that same note, I've worried about the effects that modern medicine might have in short-circuiting evolution/natural selection. Would love to hear from someone with qualifications to speak on this matter.
Modern medicine absolutely short-circuits natural selection. If you have an older sibling who was delivered via C-section chances are you wouldn't exist.
The large award for a medical malpractice trial was the reason for doctors pushing for a C-section if there’s any possibility of a complication. (Sometimes called defensive medicine.)
Most people point to the cases won by John Edwards, trial lawyer and vice presidential candidate as the reason for the great increase in C-sections. His case wins include 30 trials at which he won at least $1 million dollars each.
In my generation (80s-90s) pretty much everyone in Brazil that was born in a hospital was born through C-section. Only recently did the practice of defaulting to c-section is beginning to fade.
We’re were photocopying photocopies. But I guess if you’re taking two copies and tracing a third that is based on them but doesn’t actually have to be a facsimile, it gives nature more flexibility?
Like I’m not sure it actually works this way but I can intuit why it’s possible, given the new life doesn’t have to be an exact replication.
There are a bunch of mechanisms in sperm/eggs for better protection/repair/removal by suicide than in any other tissue. It makes sense that these evolved to be the best in these cells compared to any other. Also other tissues might have significantly worse problems having cells kill themselves instead of continuing to operate with a corrupted genome.
Naturally the reset happens before most cells have grown, part of the trick in doing it with grown humans is doing so without destroying existing tissue or causing cancer.
It's almost like trying to change the flavor of a cake after it's been baked. Significantly easier to swap out ingredients before it's that far in the process.
Well, that seems a bit reductive because nothing can create a single cell right now. All cells are self-copied-and-divided. Omnis cellula e cellula, as they say. There is no cell constructor anywhere. Both Nature and Artifice use the same device to make more cells: a previous cell.
To encode all the atomic data and relative position of a single human cell probably would take a good chunk of all the hard drives in the world. A cell is not like a silicon chip where 99% of it is just repeating the same patterns.
it's possible to convert stem cells or skin cells into functional egg cells (ova) in lab settings, though the technology remains experimental and not yet ready for routine clinical use
I'm always reading about amazing stuff like this with modern medicine. Things that work great in lab settings: cures for cancer, organ scaffolding, regrowing teeth, etc etc.
Lots of tech gets discovered, is heavily patented, and then 20 years late,r when that large first round of patents expire, people start working on and developing the tech.
This is an article that you need to read critically, beyond the headline.
Even a few paragraphs down they say this:
> The optimal age to freeze eggs varies depending on the source and metric, but almost all sources agree it's sometime between 19 and 26.
So there's some heavy bias inserted already into the title.
The next chart shows a peak around 19, but if you read the fine print it's not a chart about eggs at all. The subtitle says it shows:
> probability of getting pregnant for couples not on birth control
Not the quality of eggs frozen. They're saying one thing in text and showing a chart of something else. If you can't imagine why couples in their early 20s might have a higher rate of pregnancy than couples in their 50s then you might want to think a little deeper about the factors that go into that.
The writeup then goes into polygenic embryo screening, which then jumps to improving IQ by selecting embryos, which gets to their final argument which is that it's easier to collect more eggs when younger. So freezing a lot of eggs when you're younger allows for more boosting of your child's IQ through genetic screening based on a company called Herasight's data. Herasight has been widely criticized for overselling their abilities. Also, why do so many rationalist writeups end up back at a conversation about genetics and IQ?
Well, the website is called lesswrong.com, and not correct.com.
This article is answering a different question to what it is asking. It's asking "What is the most effective strategy to freeze your eggs if you're absolutely certain you will need to".
The reason women freeze their eggs in their early 30s is because they still have a good chance for it to be effective and they now have a strong idea they'll need to. You don't have that second piece of information at age 19.
Or to be specific: What is the size of the cohort of women you are expecting to freeze their eggs at the age of 19, who will use those frozen eggs. How many of them will give birth to children without the help of IVF, and how many will choose never to have children.
I think this article is a good example of rationalism. Which is basically getting very mathsy about 1 specific very of the data, without viewing the data in the context of the decision that is being made.
For example, what is the percentage of women you expect to freeze their eggs at age 19, who you then expect to be unable to afford the $500 every year to keep those eggs frozen over the next decade?
Having done IVF with my wife I think this is the most underrated fertility advice available today.
I don't understand why governments of countries with increasing average age and low birth rate don't pay for this for all women. This is one the best pro-family policies that can be implemented.
> This is one the best pro-family policies that can be implemented
Hard disagree on that. You're coming from an angle of someone who wanted to have kids and do it in a mathematically optimal way. A lot of people see egg freezing as a way to delay having kids until they're older, which can become a disincentive to raising families when they're young and healthy enough to do it. If you want a pro-family policy, you should be spending the money on people with families and their children, not on a tool that is used to delay having children in common use.
Another huge problem with this proposal is that freezing eggs is only a small part of the cost. The cost of IVF later in life could push into six figures depending on how many rounds are needed. If we're talking about pro-family policies that can cost upwards of $50,000 to $100,000 per family, there are many more effective places to spend that like on childcare options.
Most 19 year olds probably wouldn't opt into injecting themselves twice a day for weeks and dealing with the side effects of the injections, then the subsequent extraction procedures (likely for multiple rounds) even if it was paid for. Which is reasonable, considering most women who want children will have them without IVF and don't need to go through any of that.
Doesn't that just make it a cheaper policy to implement, since very few will take advantage of it?
It's not only hard and painful, but potentially damaging to the woman's body and could leave them with permanent hormonal issues.
So, no. It's not a good policy.
Then it's not a very good population policy.
It still might end up as yet another thing we do to women's bodies.
To be clear: I agree that it's not great policy to pressure women into doing this (which, arguably, making egg-freezing free would tend to do), bodily autonomy concerns chief among them. It's also not great policy to withhold this as an option from poor women while allowing rich ones access to it (the status quo). The third option would be to ban it, but that has obvious problems too most notably that womens' reproductive health is already surveilled and politicized enough without adding another new crime to police for around it. Allowing it in certain circumstances (a "medical waiver" or similar) just reproduces that same issues as banning it, and would probably be just a waystation on the way to a full ban.
I've yet to see a good proposal for how to regulate or handle this as a society, so my best guess is that we keep the status quo (it's expensive so only rich people can do it) for the foreseeable future UNLESS it becomes some kind of culture war issue for MAGA, which seems honestly pretty likely. Presumably they would want to ban it, but allow exceptions for certain cases that amount to "but is the patient a married white woman with acceptable politics?" in a more legally palatable form.
Thanks for bringing in some common sense.
That money is better invested in providing affordable family housing. Even if IVF is available no one is going to actually have kids if you do nothing to make it economically sustainable to start a family.
Do we really want to rely on IVF to solve the fact that people can only afford a family home once they're well into their 40s? It's insanity if you ask me.
I went through it with my wife too and expecting a 19 y/o women to go through the IVF process as an insurance policy is a bit insane to me. In our modern, western society, this is age is still solidly childhood with not much definitive thoughts of future family, marriage, etc.
Governments need to make COL more affordable, birth rate will go up naturally
Calling 19 "childhood" is crazy. Most teens have an understanding of what they want their life to look like.
At least with people in my circle of the US, it feels like there's an increasing infantilizing people (frequently themselves), particularly in regards to things like marriage and raising a family. Yet, by 19 you'll have either made decisions for yourself or someone else has for you, that will likely put you on track for your entire future career direction (education, interests, college choice, maybe even enlisted in the military).
You don't need to have given "definitive thought" to your entire future to not be a child anymore.
We definitely need better COL but I'm not convinced it's is the main factor for low birth rates as most countries living in poverty have very high birth rates. I think its a cultural difference that values earlier marriage and heavy family involvement in raising children which, the latter, reduces the stress of having to parent by yourself.
I think there’s a middle ground where in the US many people would be having kids around 30 if they could afford it. Our recent past reflects that. Even the number of kids have been reduced as the cost has become too high, so it’s not parenthood or responsibility alone people are avoiding. Comparing to poverty situations introduces a whole plethora of variables. Kids are seen more as assets than liabilities, as they will care for you in old age and/or can contribute to the household after the first dozen or so years. This is not really a comparison to the rich nations.
We, in the US, don't even have universal day care, or hundreds of other sensible things that would make child-rearing easy/less expensive. Jumping straight to "let's cover expensive IVF programs" is... well a big leap.
Of course, there are too many “learing” centers draining resources…
Then I look forward to DOGE funding more pro-family benefits by eliminating those cases of wasted resources. /s
I don't see a very big reason mentioned: You might not need it at all. Sure, the optimal age to freeze might be 19, but if 80% of women are done with children by age 30, why would you have every woman spend the equivalent of buying a small car on something they're overwhelmingly not going to need?
Waiting to get a good balance of "your eggs are still reasonably healthy" and "if you haven't had kids until now, it'll probably be a while still" is probably the reason behind the current advice.
Apparently the harvesting procedure typically (but not always?) involves general anesthesia. That alone is never entirely risk-free. In this context, the temporary loss of bodily autonomy could be particularly problematic. All that comes on top of the required hormone treatment. It's not a trivial procedure.
On the other hand, it may be a useful tool to resist expectations to become a mother until it becomes socially acceptable to say no. So it might be important even if the eggs are not getting used.
There's no way it's a worthwhile investment to invest thousands of dollars and take on significant risk and discomfort just for a tool to "resist expectations." You should invest that in a therapist. Or moving to a different state.
If you're curious what it's like for a couple of normies doing IVF, I wrote down our experience here to the degree I remembered: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF
If I'm understanding that right, it cost $25k per run, and you did 3 runs, so $75k total? Or was it $25k for the full thing? Did insurance cover anything?
Our IVF clinic has a publicly available price sheet[0] so that is correct (thought he prices are higher now): $75k total for us. My wife and I are relatively old. Friends who were approximately 10 years younger collected some 50 eggs on a single cycle. There is a drop-off in egg -> embryo but the women with the 50 eggs are likely going to end up with more usable embryos than us.
Insurance coverage is broader now. When we did it, we used cash pay but nowadays where we live in California there is SB 729 that means most big insurance plans will cover IVF. Personally, I think that's a bit regressive. Older, more established couples like us are benefiting from what will be primarily paid into by younger couples. But if pre-implantation testing becomes widespread (a good thing, imho) then IVF will be more widespread so perhaps this is a forward-looking policy. Still, expanding the child tax credit and raising it to 10x what it is would be good, I think.
0: https://springfertility.com/finance/
Didn't read that account but I went through it with wife. The egg collecting / embryo creating process is the expensive part, so depends on how many times you have to do that process. The re-implantation was significantly cheaper, so also depends on how many times you have to do that part but at least its less costly.
We ended up doing 1 extraction and 2 implantations. If I remember it was roughly ($15k-20k) then (~$5k * 2). This was about 8-9 years ago. We had no fertility issues and had other reasons for doing IVF, but if you do have fertility issues it's more risk the extraction and embryo process will fail and need repeating.
I went through this with my partner and it cost around CAD $30K all-in. Thankfully it was 100% covered by insurance (for the drugs) and by a provincial program (for the procedure).
The drugs for stimulating follicle growth cost around $500/day and the first cycle didn't result in enough mature follicles to be worth attempting the egg harvesting. In the second attempt, the duration was extended after a scan to let more develop. Every extra day, is an another $500.
If it weren't for the government program we were seriously looking at going to one of the many clinics in Mexico offering these services.
We weren't so lucky with the numbers though; here's significant attrition at every step and if you aren't starting with a good number it can look like: 5 follicles > 4 mature eggs > 2 embryos > 1 child
how were the adverse effects during the hormone / endocrine therapy for her?
This is a common question we get. I will ask her again and add it there, but she described:
* feeling bloated during the process (and feeling heavy in the stomach)
* the discomfort of the actual injections (there are two daily)
* pain post-retrieval that was reminiscent of cramps
One of our other friends who had many eggs retrieved on a single cycle actually got ovarian torsion which is supposed to be outrageously painful.
thanks for sharing that's helpful. I've heard similar to more moderate ill effects from the therapy
This video on YT explains the not much talked about side effects and risks that can come from egg retrieval. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAMrwAGR3GA
It's also the optimal age to have children. Fertility is highest, the woman is likely healthy and strong, lowest risk of complications.
It's also the optimal age to not have children! You're still figuring out your life, probably no stable partner or job, time to do some stuff you'll regret later, etc.
Yes, I was only speaking biologically.
"Figuring out your life" was not a thing when humans evolved.
Biological optimal vs societal optimal.
"Societal optimal" should really include consideration of whether that society can sustain itself.
I would reframe it from
> Biological optimal vs societal optimal
to
> Biological optimal vs personal optimal
Aside from the part where you have to raise them, sure.
If everyone had kids at 18-20, then the grandparents could take care of the grandkids while in their 40s while the parents build their careers from 20-40, then start taking care of the grandkids as the cycle repeats
And then you end up raising your grandkids instead of the kids you gave birth to. It's not something that comes without cost. And what if you don't particularly trust your parents to raise kids? I suppose you would have no idea whether you did or not, because they would not have parented you...
Peoples 40s and 50s are their most productive years. We would be better off just letting people take 10 years off in their twenties - but most people would just party party party (what they do anyway)
Given two parents, there are four grandparents. Sharing the load across six people is much better than sharing between two.
It really seems you have no idea what you’re talking about.
I have a couple of friends married for about 4-5 years, with a 4-years old son and a one year old daughter. They both have graduate degrees and stable jobs. They are near 40 years old.
Man, they are two zombies. They are drained. They push forward for the immense love of their kids but it’s incredibly evident they’re drained.
And the thing is… having kids at almost 40 should really be discouraged. They simply don’t have the same energy they had when they were 20, of course. Heck, i’m 33 and it’s evident to me I don’t have the same energy as when I was 23.
This modern idea that one should postpone having kids is incredibly stupid, I hope at some point society will self-correct somehow.
The optimal age to have children is way before you need to rely on frozen eggs (one reason among many being that this process doesn't always work)
My parents and my spouse's parents were all in their late 30s having children, now we're in the same position due to infertility and now finally going through IVF. We're happy it's working but at the same time it's sad knowing they'll grow up never really knowing their grandparents.
The grandparent situation is sad af. It's also pretty sad being a mid-40s year old dad that doesn't have the energy to keep up with their kid. I pitched a little league game yesterday and it wiped me out. Also, the fact I (and you) will not know our grandchildren very well also is quite sad.
If my son has his first kid the same age I had him, I'll be in my 80s when that kid is starting little league (or that age). Then, factor in the fact that I don't know of any men in my family that have lived past 80 and it gets really grim. They were all heavy smokers and drinkers I remind myself with fingers crossed.
The most sad part for me, is I realized by delaying parenthood - I was just being selfish - and the net result is I minimized "shared time on earth" with the person I love the most. It's easy to say I wouldn't have been a good parent or I wanted X job/income first, but it's all just excuses and selfishness.
If you had kids earlier, you wouldn't get more time with the specific person you love that is your son, you'd get more time with a different son. No doubt you'd love your counterfactual son too. But you shouldn't feel bad for having done any wrong by your real kid. This is the only timeline he could exist in.
Bit of a thorny philosophical argument, maybe, but reasonable in this case.
>by delaying parenthood - I was just being selfish.. I minimized "shared time on earth"
Exactly. My advice to anyone is not wait. If we hadn't, we would have found out sonner that we needed to go through that process. It's not a "wake up and schedule an appointment tomorrow" kind of thing, it's a treatment of last resort and you can burn years trying, going through evaluations and alternatives first.
Since having kids is so tiring in the early years and often lead to a divorce, it is better to have them early when you are still fresh and handle better the lack of sleep, divorce early and then enjoy part time parenthood when you are still youngish.
I feel I am a better parent now that I am sharing custody of my kids and can better balance personal life and hobbies and parenthood.
A cheaper option would be to find someone looking for kids with no romance and agree on having shared parenthood.
I had my kids late in life and I always thought my life experience was a bonus when it came to raising the kids and wrt keeping it together with the wife.
Same and feel the same (in addition to financial stability) but oh so often I wish I had my kid earlier in my life
I’m vastly happier having had kids in my 30s rather than my 20s. Greater emotional and financial stability as well as a strong foundation for my marriage were boons.
I have to ask, what's the custody split?
50/50
The main downside is relocating is impossible until your kids reach adulthood if you want to keep it that way so that is something to consider.
Employers encouraging egg freezing by offering egg freezing benefits is an abysmal conflict of interest. Employers reap tremendous medium-term benefits and the woman bears all of the long-term risks -- in this case the biggest risk of all .
Employers should be required to pay for future maternity disability care insurance e.g. 2-3 years of maternal leave fully paid, elective at any time, even after they separate from the company. Also disability compensation in the event that fertility fails. e.g. $500k / missed fertility .
That would reveal the true success rate of the procedure. If employers or fertility clinics believed it to be a deterministic process, the risks for the employer would be low.
> Lastly, the stem cells we're planning to use to make these eggs accrue mutations with age, and we don't currently have a good method to fix these before making them into eggs. These mutations will bring additional risk of various serious diseases, only some of which we currently have the genetic screening to detect.
I've always found this one fascinating. Somehow human cells age and humans get old and die but humans can somehow make an entirely new creature through reproduction where that is reset and most of the defects from the parent are gone as well.
How does that work and what stumbling blocks exist that prevent us from replicating it?
> Somehow human cells age and humans get old and die but humans can somehow make an entirely new creature through reproduction where that is reset
I think the eggs aren't dividing as you age (you are born with them, so to speak) and the sperm is held "outside" the body.
One is in original packaging and the other is produced in a "cooler" enviroment by the billions with a heavy QA failure of 99.9999%.
I don't know anything about this subject, but I thought it was just natural selection that effectively filtered out the 'bad eggs', as it were. On that same note, I've worried about the effects that modern medicine might have in short-circuiting evolution/natural selection. Would love to hear from someone with qualifications to speak on this matter.
Modern medicine absolutely short-circuits natural selection. If you have an older sibling who was delivered via C-section chances are you wouldn't exist.
That’s not true for the USA however.
The large award for a medical malpractice trial was the reason for doctors pushing for a C-section if there’s any possibility of a complication. (Sometimes called defensive medicine.)
Most people point to the cases won by John Edwards, trial lawyer and vice presidential candidate as the reason for the great increase in C-sections. His case wins include 30 trials at which he won at least $1 million dollars each.
In my generation (80s-90s) pretty much everyone in Brazil that was born in a hospital was born through C-section. Only recently did the practice of defaulting to c-section is beginning to fade.
Modern medicine is part and parcel of natural evolution. There is no short-circuiting of evolution. That's not a thing.
We’re were photocopying photocopies. But I guess if you’re taking two copies and tracing a third that is based on them but doesn’t actually have to be a facsimile, it gives nature more flexibility?
Like I’m not sure it actually works this way but I can intuit why it’s possible, given the new life doesn’t have to be an exact replication.
Isn’t that what stem cell therapy is?
There are a bunch of mechanisms in sperm/eggs for better protection/repair/removal by suicide than in any other tissue. It makes sense that these evolved to be the best in these cells compared to any other. Also other tissues might have significantly worse problems having cells kill themselves instead of continuing to operate with a corrupted genome.
Naturally the reset happens before most cells have grown, part of the trick in doing it with grown humans is doing so without destroying existing tissue or causing cancer.
It's almost like trying to change the flavor of a cake after it's been baked. Significantly easier to swap out ingredients before it's that far in the process.
It's wild that in the year 2026 modern science can't recreate a SINGLE cell (which is what a human egg/ovum is).
Well, that seems a bit reductive because nothing can create a single cell right now. All cells are self-copied-and-divided. Omnis cellula e cellula, as they say. There is no cell constructor anywhere. Both Nature and Artifice use the same device to make more cells: a previous cell.
It wouldn't be wild if you understood how complex cells are.
Trees are high technology. I’m not sure we’ll match that even in 100 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium describes the closest we've gotten; synthesizing the DNA and swapping it into an existing cell which then propagates the synthetic gene line.
To encode all the atomic data and relative position of a single human cell probably would take a good chunk of all the hard drives in the world. A cell is not like a silicon chip where 99% of it is just repeating the same patterns.
it's possible to convert stem cells or skin cells into functional egg cells (ova) in lab settings, though the technology remains experimental and not yet ready for routine clinical use
I'm always reading about amazing stuff like this with modern medicine. Things that work great in lab settings: cures for cancer, organ scaffolding, regrowing teeth, etc etc.
Never hear about it again after the initial news.
"Regrowing teeth" started human trials last June. Development takes time.
And there is no single cure to cancer.
Lots of tech gets discovered, is heavily patented, and then 20 years late,r when that large first round of patents expire, people start working on and developing the tech.
> Never hear about it again after the initial news.
Perhaps it is because you're not a specialist—all of these things are still worked on.
Are you looking for an explanation,
or a fix,
for this?
(The fix is to consume less popular science types of sources.)
I honestly don't look forward to the day that we can do that. It may redefine our very existence more so than even automation.
That's exactly why I look forward to it!