Good Eggs

At 37, I have about 25,000 eggs left. I am too young to start panicking about one bump in the reproductive road, and too old to relax into the process of getting pregnant.

A developing female fetus has around 6 million eggs in her ovaries. The raw material for the combined population of Los Angeles and Chicago is crammed inside the cramped studio that is a mother’s womb.

At birth, a baby girl’s egg count will have dropped to a still-robust 1 to 2 million. By the time she starts her period, she’ll be down to about 300,000, and each subsequent month, she’ll lose roughly 11,000 eggs, her fertility in a constant state of decline.

Welcome to womanhood. It’s all downhill from here. And for womxn born without ovaries, their paths to motherhood, if they choose to walk them, will be steep and winding.

The idea that a newborn baby is flush with one million eggs–stored in her tiny ovaries until puberty like strings of Christmas lights balled up in the attic–is perhaps one of nature’s cruelest evolutionary fuck yous. By the time a woman has finished her education, found steady employment, paid off her student loans, reached a semblance of financial stability, found someone she can tolerate long enough to have regular sex with, perhaps gotten married…