Your sex ed class skipped a lot of important stuff.
You might’ve learned women are born with all the eggs they’re ever going to have - roughly 1 MILLION. But around 10,000 die every month during childhood, so most of us reach puberty with roughly ~300,000 eggs. Then each month, we release one while another 1,000 die. So over time there is this big decline in total quantity of eggs and that can be a big issue.
But another issue is how many of those eggs have 23 chromosomes. This is called “egg quality." Most of the time, having any other number of chromosomes means the resulting embryo never implants or grows. But you only release one egg a month, and as you get older, the chances that egg doesn’t have 23 chromosomes goes up. So scientists found it’s possible to remove eggs, freeze them, and then unfreeze them to use later! Real life cryosleep!
But there are some big issues...
Watch our longer video to learn about egg freezing and subscribe here for more optimistic science and tech stories.
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