Did this 'New Girl' episode freak you out?

Did you freak out after watching this episode of 'New Girl'?  Jess was freaking out after her gynecologist friend broke the news that a woman can lose up to 90 percent of her eggs by age 30.  As cosmopolitan.com points out, Jess's panic session was funny—but do we really lose most of our eggs by age 30?

Dr. Lauren Streicher, assistant clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University
Eggs tells Cosmo that eggs "do age, but as long as you are ovulating and it's a good quality egg, it doesn't matter how many you've got in the bank." 

Dr. Streicher says egg quality is more important than egg quantity, a factor that just varies from lady to lady. We are born with about 100,000 eggs and we slowly lose them over our lifetime, but there is no magic rule that says egg count drops dramatically at age 30. 

"Even if you did lose 90,000 eggs by age 30, who cares?" she says. "You’ve still got 10,000. That's enough for 10,000 babies." Which would be about 9,998 more than a lot of us could handle! 

Well, that's all well and good, but sounds a little bit too simple and too good to be true.  So I scrolled down to the comments of the article.

A woman pointed out a study that was featured on abc two years ago: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/women-fertility-falls-lose-90-percent-eggs-30/story?id=9693015#.UMH6wJPjnIZ.

Dr. Marie Savard, a "Good Morning America" medical contributor, discussed a study which looked at the egg supply of 325 women of varying ages from the UK, the US, and also Europe and answered some frequently asked fertility questions for women.

The full study can be found here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008772.

The most important point that the findings of the study shows is that women lose eggs a lot faster than was previously thought, and that by the age of 30, we lose about 90% of our egg reserves!

The GMA piece did answer the question that the 'New Girl' episode brought up for many of us about having your eggs counted. The answer?  It's not possible.  You can measure the size of your ovaries and test your hormone levels, but there is no way to know for sure how many quality eggs you have left.

What is the take away message of this study & news story?  Have kids earlier rather than later if possible.

I'm 31, and B & I are planning on doing IVF when I'm 32 if we are not pregnant on our own yet.  We started out on this whole infertility road when I turned 27, and started seeking help when I was 29.  When we started, I was still at a healthy reproductive age and by the time we hopefully get pregnant with ART I'll be entering the age of those poor women who "waited too long" to have kids.  Not fair.

I wish they didn't blame it so much on women's rights and career driven goals.  Some of us try to start at a younger age and still face these issues.  ART is expensive for most of us, and so we don't always have the luxury of jumping into IVF as soon as we find out that conceiving naturally won't come easy to us.

I can have a career and not blame my infertility on it.