Fertility in your 30s
You’re most fertile in your 20s and after that, your fertility starts to decline which means it might be more difficult to get (or stay) pregnant. By age 35, a healthy woman has approximately a 15% chance of getting pregnant each month.
However, if you’re in your early 30s, it doesn’t mean you need to start panicking. While it’s easier to get pregnant when you were younger, many women can and do conceive on their own all the time in their 30s. There are a few things to keep in mind if you’re in your 30s and want to get pregnant eventually.
Your eggs’ age and quality
While men continuously produce sperm after they reach puberty, you’re born all of the eggs you’ll ever have. By the time you’re 30, only about 100,000 remain (down from a million at birth). It may still seem like a lot to work with, but there’s more to fertility than how many eggs you have.
By age 45, the chances of conceiving on your own are rare. As you age, not only do you have to deal with fewer eggs, but the ones remaining are getting older as well. This is referred to as your egg quality. As eggs age, they are more likely to contain chromosomal abnormalities.
Each egg typically has 23 chromosomes. Combined with 23 chromosomes from the sperm cell, a chromosomally normal embryo needs to have a total of 46 of these to be considered chromosomally normal (known as euploid embryos). Chromosomally abnormal eggs (known as aneuploid embryos) are less likely to implant in the uterus and have a higher risk of miscarriage.
Learn about improving egg quality when you’re trying to conceive
Know your hormones
Hormones play an important role in your fertility and it may be a good idea to undergo fertility testing to help determine your overall fertility health and if you’re ovulating. These tests can also help in figuring out how you’ll respond to medications to stimulate your ovaries..
Follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH), estradiol (E2), and anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) are all evaluated via blood work. These hormones plays a critical in role in the growth and development of your eggs, as well as ovulation.
Learn more about fertility hormones
If you want to freeze your eggs
We’ll say this again: just because you’re 30 now doesn’t mean you’ll have trouble getting pregnant. But if you’re not ready to have children yet, you could consider freezing your eggs for future use. Your eggs are going to be better quality now than they will be in a few years. By freezing eggs, you can preserve some of that fertility down the road. This involves taking medication to stimulate your ovaries to grow, surgically retrieving eggs, and having the healthy mature eggs frozen and stored until you’re ready to use them.
If it’s been more than a year of actively trying to get pregnant, or six months if you have a medical condition that affects reproduction, it might be a good idea to get advice from a fertility specialist. Make an appointment with one of our CCRM fertility specialists to help you come up with an approach to grow your family.
