Reactions were varied among friends and family when I recently started looking into the process of packing some of my ladies on ice.
“You have plenty of time, don’t you?”
“Can you really afford it?”
“I thought you didn’t even want kids?”
“Are you crazy?”
The answers to those questions all in good time—for now let’s start with one simple fact. I’m just a few weeks away from becoming a thirty-something and not just a thirty year old. While that tidbit isn’t significant in and of itself, when taken in the context of fertility it’s as if the tolling of the bells has begun.
Like a lot of women, I’m noncommittal on whether or not I will make children a part of my life someday. I won’t get into all the reasons here, but what I do know for certain is that I don’t want kids right now. If children make it into the picture, it’s going to happen later in life for me. But whether by adoption or a late pregnancy, I hadn’t given much thought to the actual nuts and bolts of putting off parenthood until the last year or so. The numbers, it turns out, require careful consideration.
It’s a generally accepted fact that the fertility clock begins its dangerous slide toward oblivion at 35. That’s the age when the scale tips in the direction of having more genetically-risky eggs than not, when your rate of ovulation has drastically declined—making conception more difficult, and when you’re more likely to experience various complications than younger ladies who pop out their rugrats in their 20s and early 30s.
That said, it’s impossible to ignore the trend—and the celebrity media coverage—of women having healthy pregnancies in their late 30s, 40s, and beyond. While cautionary tales exist, they’ve been mostly limited to the risk associated with the resulting children. (Certain birth defects as well as conditions like autism are increasingly being linked, at least in part, to the older birth age of mothers and even fathers.) New studies, however, have shown that becoming pregnant after 40, and especially after 45, carries serious risks for the long term health, and life expectancy, of older moms too.
Faced with the possibility of forfeiting my own health along with that of my child’s, I’ve ruled out a post-45 pregnancy as an option for me. Also, since I’ve seen the risks of using 37 and 42 year-old plus eggs in my own family, I’m limiting my own genetic material to the generally accepted shelf-life of 35. And while adoption is still an ideal alternative for me, it’s not a fail-safe. Stable, married couples still find it an uphill battle and single women in this country have an even harder time convincing the state that they can provide a loving home for baby. There are simply no guarantees.
So where does that leave me? At the beginning of a potentially long and expensive journey of harvesting and freezing my own eggs, just in case I want to use them down the road.
Last Friday, after a long health history interview and initial planning session, I scheduled an appointment for a fertility assessment in late August. I’ll be going off the Pill next week for the first time since I was 19 years old so we can see how my ovaries do on their own and whether my body seems capable of producing the necessary eggs. I’ve also placed the initial calls to my insurance provider and health savings account administrator to explore the financial side of this ‘little’ endeavor. Let me tell you, it ain’t pretty, though it is within the realm of possibility.
More on all of that next time.