--- title: Pregnancy: When Are Women Most Fertile? description: A woman's fertility peaks between the late teens and early 30s. Why fertility starts falling at 35 is still unclear. canonical: https://time.com/4585194/women-fertility-pregnancy/ author: Markham Heid article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-11-30T14:24:06.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:49:14.383Z article:section: Health og:title: You Asked: When Are Women Most Fertile? og:description: A woman's fertility peaks between the late teens and early 30s. Why fertility starts falling at 35 is still unclear. og:url: https://time.com/4585194/women-fertility-pregnancy/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt81cc1144468eea06/6988affff887dcf795e98581/when-are-women-fertile.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: Close-up of a clock hanging on the wall og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: You Asked: When Are Women Most Fertile? twitter:description: A woman's fertility peaks between the late teens and early 30s. Why fertility starts falling at 35 is still unclear. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt81cc1144468eea06/6988affff887dcf795e98581/when-are-women-fertile.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # You Asked: When Are Women Most Fertile? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: The Truth About Egg Freezing [Watch (HLS stream): The Truth About Egg Freezing](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/A1nDxOli.m3u8) (8:41)  _Published 2015-07-16. Vicki Rokhlin, 28, is relying on her 14 frozen eggs to have children. But will they work?_ by [Markham Heid](https://time.com/author/markham-heid/) ## Markham Heid Markham Heid is a contributor at TIME. He is the author of The Habit Trap, due out in early 2027. Nov 30, 2016 2:24 PM UTC  Getty Images by [Markham Heid](https://time.com/author/markham-heid/) ## Markham Heid Markham Heid is a contributor at TIME. He is the author of The Habit Trap, due out in early 2027. Nov 30, 2016 2:24 PM UTC Our collective recognition that a woman’s fertility declines with age is nothing new. But, frustratingly, experts are still trying to figure out just why that happens. “The short answer is that a woman’s eggs just aren’t as zippy as they were when she was younger,” says Dr. Mary Jane Minkin, clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at Yale University School of Medicine. Citing [data from](https://www.sartcorsonline.com/rptCSR%5FPublicMultYear.aspx?ClinicPKID=0) the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), Minkin points out that a woman’s fertility remains relatively constant during her late teens, 20s and early 30s. That’s not to say conception is guaranteed; even for a healthy 30-year-old, the odds she’ll get pregnant during any specific ovulation cycle is just 20%. That means 4 out of 5 women who try to conceive this month will still be trying next month. But around age 35, the average woman experiences a drop-off in fertility that accelerates until her mid-40s, when her odds of a successful pregnancy fall into the low single digits. “Part of the issue is that we’re born with all the eggs we’re going to have, and as we get older they get older with us,” Minkin explains. These eggs don’t respond as readily to the surge of luteinizing hormone (LH) that a woman’s pituitary gland releases during ovulation, she says. (If you’ve ever used an ovulation kit, LH is the hormone that kit measures in your urine.) Chromosome abnormalities also increase as a woman ages. “When you look at women in their late 30s or 40s, instead of having 23 chromosomes, more of the eggs have an extra one or a missing one,” says Dr. Richard Bronson, director of reproductive endocrinology at Stony Brook University. But the big question—why do a woman’s eggs decline in quality as she grows older?—remains unanswered. “Is it that a woman’s body uses her best eggs first, or is something happening to the eggs as a woman ages?” Bronson asks. “No one knows.” That may soon change. Bronson says some of the latest research suggests mitochondrial function within the egg may diminish with age, which could lead to chromosome abnormalities. Lifestyle factors ranging from cigarette smoking to obesity and stress could play a role as well, though much of the current research is speculative. “There’s no question general health affects reproduction,” he says. But exactly how all these variables interact is a complicated puzzle experts are still working to assemble. Even if an egg is perfectly healthy, the overall quality of the “intrauterine environment” changes as a woman grows older, Minkin explains. (Of course, the health of a man’s sperm also plays a part. But for the average man, sperm quality doesn’t become a problem until he reaches his 60s, [according to SART](https://www.asrm.org/uploadedFiles/ASRM%5FContent/Resources/Patient%5FResources/Fact%5FSheets%5Fand%5FInfo%5FBooklets/agefertility.pdf).) The more we learn about the miracle of conception, the more it seems just that: miraculous. “It’s all a very delicate show,” Minkin says of conception and pregnancy. “I try to encourage my patients, if they can, to start thinking about having a baby by 35.” She’s careful to stress that “it’s not all doom and gloom” once a woman reaches her mid-30s. “But there are more significant hurdles,” she says: hurdles modern medicine hasn’t found a way to consistently overleap quite yet. ## Transcript I liken it to the feeling when my friends get engaged and they're so excited that they just solved this huge mystery in their life, and I'm happy for them. But, when I went through it and when I froze my eggs, I realized that I I've done this for myself. There was no man swooping in to fill in this puzzle piece. That was really empowering to know that I took fate into my own hands, and have changed the path of my life, because I wanted to, and I could. [ MUSIC ] I have a lot of these dreams that I wanna live out on my timeline. A lot of those dreams include long spans of international travel. I wanna write a novel. At one point, I'd love to be a TED talker. And so I was at my gynecologist office and she was so supportive when I was telling her about my dreams. And I was having a lot of anxiety How I was going to fulfill all these dreams before 32, 33, 34. And so we started talking about egg freezing. I kind of brought it up to her as a joke. And she said, you know, you should really think about this. And so she referred me to a doctor. We've seen a transformation in the type of patient who comes in for elective egg freezing. Six or seven years ago, it was often a woman who was experiencing concerns over her reproductive potential, Many of them already had diminished ovarian reserve. We could fast forward that today, where the woman are coming in. They're 35 years old, very frequently. The buzz is in the air at the company that Women her age, in her situation, are taking charge of their fertility, are coming in and freezing their eggs. So the culture has changed dramatically. [ MUSIC ] So I'll show you what we're basically trying to do is replace the water in the cell with a sugar- based cryoprotectant solution so that there are no ice crystals. Ice crystals cause damage to cell membranes [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Okay. Now I'm going to load the eggs onto the cryo device. All right, and then they get plunged into the liquid nitrogen. So this is the liquid nitrogen tank. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] This one here [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ INAUDIBLE ] That's it. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] We've been fortunate enough to have dozens of women achieve a healthy pregnancy after using their thawed eggs. Recent reports in the literature suggests that over 10, 000 healthy babies have now been born from egg freezing technology. But some of those numbers that you just mentioned. Those are often just any births from a frozen egg. They don't necessarily distinguish between whether the egg was frozen by a donor or by a mother herself. Do you have any data about The number of babies that have been born from the mother's own frozen egg here at this clinic. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So reports suggest that we've had over 10, 000 babies nationally and internationally from frozen eggs. But I know a lot of those babies aren't necessarily from women who have electively frozen their eggs for social reasons, many of them are from donor eggs. There is a difference from taking a 22 year old frozen egg and taking a 35 or 40 year old woman's egg. and someday thawing and fertilizing and transferring. So we have to be really careful about how we council patients. I know that many of the patients who freeze their eggs here are going to be able to someday have a healthy baby, but it won't be everybody. That's why it's not an insurance policy. It's just an opportunity to take some control over something we've really never had control of before. The truth about egg freezing is it's a relatively new procedure. It was just declassified as being experimental about a little over a year ago. So for that reason, there is not this large, comprehensive data pool of the number of eggs frozen, and then thawed, that have become babies. The vast majority of eggs that have been frozen have not been retrieved yet. So women have to understand that there are no numbers for them to call from when they are looking for will this work me. Because I'm 28 and my fertility is the best that it will ever get, I was able to do everything in one round. And I didn't understand the power of that until I woke up in the hospital right after surgery next to a 34 year old woman and she told me this was her third time trying this year, that's putting your body through three rounds of hormone injections, three surgeries And it's three times as expensive. And so the moment that really validated it for me was when this 34 year- old woman who had done 3 rounds in a year turned to me and said, wow. I wish someone had told me to do this at 28 cuz I would have. Some physicians and some marketing fertility arms do push women to freeze their eggs when they're at a very young age. Other clinics prefer that women wait until age 30 because what they've found is that the younger you are when you freeze, the less likely you are to need the eggs later on. However, as with most things in life, this is a double- edged sword. The younger you are, the better the quality of your eggs is going to be. Decreasing fertility starts during the time a woman is in her late puberty and goes throughout her life. Even when a woman is still getting her period in her late forties or even early fifties, it doesn't mean she's making normal eggs and that they're gonna be able to end up with healthy babies from that. It's not the success rate. It's the success rate for women like you. Are you 29? Are you 39? Are you 33? How are your tubes? Or do you have endometriosis? What's your hormonal health like? What's your body mass index? There are a huge number of varietal. That will determine conception success, whether it's natural or medically enhanced. Before I did all the research, I thought egg freezing was easy. And then I started reading blogs. And I started to get a sense of like whoa, your body goes through a lot. You're essentially forcing yourself to go into pregnancy mode in two weeks instead of nine months. I mean my estrogen shot up from 61 to 1900, I felt crazy. And I wasn't really prepared for that. Most of the women that have reached out to me The overall theme is, thank you for bringing awareness to the gravity of how much you put your body through, how much time this takes, how different your life is. Women shouldn't take this lightly, it's a big financial consideration, it's a big health consideration. It's a month of your life that you're sitting at home, you're not dating, you're not drinking, you're not smoking, you're not partying, you're not traveling. That was really hard for me Me. I mean I was up every morning at 7 AM to get an ultrasound, and a blood test. [ MUSIC ] I think there's no guarantee in life, right? No guarantee that I could have a child naturally, and there's no guarantee that one of these implanted embryos will stick. So, all that I can do is Is give my kids the best shot of a healthy future as possible. [ MUSIC ] Egg freezing is an amazing Oppurtunity but it is not. Absoutely not. An ironclad insurance policy. Know that going in. Hedging your bets is always a good idea in life. And you've got about $ 17000 in your back pocket that you're not gonna notice if it goes away Consider egg freezing. 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