Did you know it is ten times more difficult to get pregnant at age 43 than at 37? Achieving motherhood after age 37 is also much riskier, experts spoke at the 2014 annual conference of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. With data analyzed data from around 200 women, the researchers revealed how the pregnancy process was affected with age.

“We learned that after the age of 37, there is a significant increase in the number of eggs a woman would have to generate in order to get one single embryo,” Dr. Meredith Brower explained.

Normally a woman aged 37 would have to produce 4 eggs to get a health embryo. At 1 egg per normal menstrual cycle, that equates to at least 4 months’ worth of pregnancy attempts. But by the time she reaches age 43, the need increases to 44 eggs in order to achieve 1 healthy embryo. That would take around 4 years to get pregnant.

We are at a time when many women opt to delay motherhood into their 30s. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 out of 12 women today has her first child during age 35 or older. This is in contrast to 1 out of 100 back in the 1970s.

Dr. Brower acknowledges the fact that professional and career ambitions are the most likely reasons of delaying motherhood.

“Women are now more inclined to be leaders in the workforce, and life gets busy,” she said. “As a professional woman myself, I know that there is never a good time to have a baby. There is a lot of pressure to not take time away.”

As a result, more women have turn to state-of-the-art innovations to help them get pregnant more easily. One of these processes is called Oocyte Cryopreservation, or Egg Freezing, as it is commonly known. This process involves harvesting and freezing the woman’s eggs, which shall be used when she is ready to get pregnant.

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