Is It Too Late To Have A Baby?

Fertility Age Myths and the Normal Curve 0:00

How do you know if you're running out of time to have a baby? This is a question that I get asked on a weekly basis, and there's a lot of hysteria out there. All of these fertility party lines about, if you're 35, you're over the hill. It's a geriatric pregnancy. It's advanced maternal age. If you're 40, you're basically screwed. If you're 42. Plus, especially if you want to do IVF. Well, good luck. Your odds are so low of success, right? We hear all of these things constantly. And it's not that they're isn't truth in these statements, because these statements actually are describing what happens on average.

So if you think about the average population, there's a normal curve that describes everything, including reproduction. So let me walk you through the normal curve. When it comes to female fertility, a woman becomes fertile when she goes through puberty, which is happening earlier on average and is starting around 11 years of age. And then she stops being fertile when she goes through menopause, which is happening on average around 50 years old. Now. A woman's fertility peaks usually around 24 years old, and then starts to decline immediately following that peak, and by 35 has declined significantly by 37, has declined even more significantly, by 40, has declined

Extending Reproductive Span and Biological Age 2:06

even more significantly, and by 41 or 42 has declined even more significantly. So much so that by the age of 44, most people are considered outside or beyond the age of 44. Most people are considered outside of reproductive age, even in epidemiological studies, reproductive aged women get cut off at 44 years old, even though most people wouldn't be able to have a baby at 44 years old. Okay, so that's what the average picture of reproductive span looks like. That's the normal curve. Now, in every case of the normal curve, you have outliers in the tails, you have a negative outlier.

And you have you have not just one. You have negative outliers and you have positive outliers. So our goal is to be positive outliers when it comes to reproductive span. And you know this intuitively when it comes to lifespan. So let me draw this parallel for you. So what happens on average a woman in the United States of America where I'm from, lives to be 80 years old. It was 81 years post-Covid or pre-COVID, but post-Covid it's 80 years old, and we know that there are some people who are negative outliers and positive outliers, that positive outliers live longer than 80, and the negative outliers live fewer than 80 years.

So you understand that when it comes to lifespan and nobody's walking around saying, now that she's having her 80th birthday, she's going to die, right? But for whatever reason, we are walking around saying now that she's had her 35th birthday, she's going to be infertile. Now that she's had her 40th birthday, she's going to be infertile. And it doesn't have to be that way. So what we want to do is to extend our reproductive span as much as possible and be those positive outliers. And the way to do it is through that emphasis on reducing biological, reproductive, epigenetic age, which is the entire focus of everything that we do in the Primester protocol, including the systemic deep scrub, which uses very specifically and strategically reproduction informed fasting to encourage DNA repair.

Autophagy mite Haffajee improved my mitochondria function, improved cardiometabolic profile being within the fertile zone of BMI and waist hip ratio, reducing inflammation, creating positive epigenetic change that can be passed on to our super babies and super grandbabies and so on. So those are just some examples of what we do in the pathways that they impact to improve fertility and equality in sperm quality through reduced biological age. Okay. So how do you know if you are running out of time to have a baby?

Signs You May Be Running Out of Time 5:36

Well, you might have an instinct. You might be having a birthday that tells you that you are based on these common party lines. You might have a lab value that tells you that you're running out of time. Maybe your AMH level is low, your anti-malarial hormone is low. It's below one, or maybe it's at one, but it's low for your age. Maybe you've been told you have premature ovarian failure. Maybe you have diminished ovarian reserve. Maybe your eggs seem to be of poor quality because you keep miscarrying, or you've had many IVF cycles and none of the embryos, none of the eggs fertilize, or none of the embryos are normal, chromosomal, normal.

After testing. Or maybe you're just worried that you're running out of time and you haven't met your partner yet. Here's what I want you to know. The earlier we have our babies, the better. That's true. We were designed biologically to reproduce in a time when lifespan wasn't that long. Number one. And number two, the stresses of the world were not what they are today. So our grandmothers generation was more fertile at 35 than a woman in her 20s is today. Because of the immense stressors in our modern world that our reproductive biology didn't evolve to understand, how do respond to to function in spite of.

So we're we're really in this incredible mismatch between the modern world that we live in and the stresses that it brings and the world that our reproductive biology evolved to survive and to function in and to thrive in. And that's a big problem. That's what is largely accounting for these massive declines in female fertility over the last six decades, and sperm count over the last four decades. There's been a more than 50% reduction in sperm count overall, on average, and in the Western world and wealthy nations. So we we have we have this problem and it's making us age faster biologically and reproductively.

Why Earlier Is Better and What to Do Next 8:09

And also, as I said already, our evolutionary history is one that encouraged us to reproduce earlier in life. So we're still those same beings at at an evolutionary level. And it's still the case that the earlier we reproduce, the better. We'll really not too early. You actually can reproduce too early, by the way, the scientific data show that that that fertility and pregnancy outcomes are adverse earlier and later. So it's still it's still ideal to reproduce around 24-25 from a biological perspective.

But many of us aren't able to or ready to do that, given the realities of the time that we live in. Staying in school longer, having to focus on careers for longer, get taking longer to get financially stable, taking longer to find the right partner, all of the things, and feeling ready to mother in the way that we really want a mother in, or a parent in the way we really want to parent and that's another thing, right? Those of us who who waited longer have one really wonderful advantage, which is that we have a different level of consciousness in our parenting and appreciation for the role of parenting and for having our super babies.

And those of you who have had to work really hard for having your super babies, that will be the most beautiful silver lining that you've. You've done so much amazing work to lay the foundation for them as you Primester, and you've done so much work to be ready for your role as mama dada parent. So earlier is better. But for many of us, that's not possible or not an option, a viable option. So the next best thing is to make ourselves as biological or biologically early in life as we can, despite our chronological age.

Okay, that's going to be the answer that we need to focus on, and the place where we have all the leverage so that we can improve our outcomes, whether we're pursuing natural conception or assisted reproduction. So now, in our next mini talk, let's tackle how to improve the quality of our eggs for getting pregnant, either naturally or using IVF or IUI I'll see you in the next one.