Egg Quality and Embryo Adoption

Many women in the United States have delayed both marriage and child-bearing.  What they may not be taking into consideration in regards to their reproductive health is the fact that the quality of the remaining eggs in her ovaries begins to diminish in her 30s and rapidly begins to diminish in her 40s.

“Women become less likely to become pregnant and more likely to have miscarriages because egg quality decreases as the number of remaining eggs dwindle in number. These changes are most noted as she reaches her mid-to-late 30s. Therefore, a woman’s age is the most accurate test of egg quality. An important change in egg quality is the frequency of genetic abnormalities called aneuploidy (too many or too few chromosomes in the egg). At fertilization, a normal egg should have 23 chromosomes, so that when it is fertilized by a sperm also having 23 chromosomes, the resulting embryo will have the normal total of 46 chromosomes. As a woman gets older, more and more of her eggs have either too few or too many chromosomes. That means that if fertilization occurs, the embryo also will have too many or too few chromosomes. Most people are familiar with Down syndrome, a condition that results when the embryo has an extra chromosome 21. Most embryos with too many or too few chromosomes do not result in pregnancy at all  or result in miscarriage. This helps explain the lower chance of pregnancy and higher chance of miscarriage in older women.” (Source: American Society of Reproductive Medicine)

Is the answer to this problem to create human embryos using purchased human eggs?  That could be one solution, but it not the only solution.  Embryo adoption may be another choice that many women are not aware of and may not be told about by their medical professional.  Learn more about how embryo adoption might be the right choice for you!

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