-Yeah!
Hey.
I'm Nicole Ellis.
I am a filmmaker. I started -- That sucked.
Let me start over again.
I'm Nicole.
I'm a reporter and filmmaker for The Washington Post.
I'm turning 30 in a few months.
I feel like 30 is that age where you reconcile, like,
where you thought you'd be in life and where you actually are.
And if I'm being honest with myself,
I'm just now getting the hang of being an adult.
Bills.
I mean, I want to have kids. I want to get married.
I want to start a family.
But I'm also afraid that I'm running out of time.
I'm thinking about freezing my eggs.
So I decided to report on it.
I feel like there's pressure on women to start settling down
and having kids in our 20s
because that's when we're most fertile.
The older we get, the harder it will be to get pregnant,
and that pressure is essentially the biological clock.
-Why? !
-And it can be really stressful for women around my age.
We hear it referenced in movies and TV shows all the time.
-My biological clock is tickin' like this,
and the way this case is goin', I ain't never gettin' married!
-By the time a lady his 30, she loses about 90% of her eggs.
-Yeah. Get this baloney.
I'm 32, but my eggs are 48, and my vagina is 97.
-I cannot believe what I just heard.
-The ticktocking of your biological clock
leading towards you the corner of Celibate and Spinster Way?
-Okay, so, I've got tons of question -- mostly,
how much time do I really have?
I feel like I want to know
if this is different for different women.
And who came up with the idea of a biological clock
in the first place?
It turns out the term was coined at The Washington Post.
In 1978, Richard Cohen first used the phrase in an article
about women in the workplace.
It's been criticized a lot over the years for framing
reproduction as solely a women's problem.
We caught up with Richard in New York.
I am here to talk to you about your 1978 article.
So, in it, you describe the biological clock as a handicap,
I mean, really, as a disadvantage.
And I'm curious -- do you still feel that way?
-When I re-read it, I didn't like some of the things I wrote.
I didn't like some of the language.
I thought it was a little too trite, a little too flip,
but I didn't mean it as a put-down.
It's not a put-down. It's a reality.
My wife was a newspaper editor at the time.
There was a whole question of, how much are you willing
to give up in your career to have a child?
Do you have to give up anything?
You know, could you have it all?
It was part of your life.
Now women can freeze their eggs, and I think that's wonderful.
-I get what Richard's saying,
but I've never felt defined by my biological clock,
and while I have more opportunities and choices
than women before me,
I still don't really understand how my body works.
I chatted with Dr. Kate Devine,
an endocrinologist in D.
C.
Hi. -I'm Dr. Devine. -Nice to meet you.
-So nice to meet you. -And the head of research
at the largest fertility clinic in the country.
-Please have a seat.
-I don't really know how much body works.
And I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more
about the female reproductive system
and what my biological clock is.
-Your biological clock is the point in time
at which you no longer
have viable eggs
that can be fertilized and make a baby.
Women are born with all the eggs we're ever gonna have.
And so a lot of people think of egg freezing
as a way to extend the biological clock,
and in many ways, that's accurate.
-29 is young to me. I still feel young.
But in egg years, it's really not.
It varies from person to person, but broadly speaking,
women are born with more than a million eggs.
But thousands of them die every month
until we go through puberty
and we're left with about 300,000 to 500,000.
We'll continue to lose about 1,000 eggs a month
after puberty until menopause,
when our ovaries stop releasing eggs, at around 51 years old.
But women typically experience a decline
in their fertility around 37,
and that's because it's not just the number of eggs
that make women less fertile as they age.
It's also the quality of those that remain.
As we get older, our eggs lose their freshness,
just like eggs you'd buy at the grocery store.
But for women, this means
the eggs can develop chromosomal abnormalities.
-And so when we say develop "chromosomal abnormality,"
what we mean is an egg that has some other number
than 23 chromosomes
because 23 chromosomes come from the egg
and 23 chromosomes come from the sperm.
And so if there is any other number than 46,
that is abnormal.
And the vast majority of these abnormal embryos
that form are going to result in the outcome
of either not pregnant --
so, the embryo doesn't implant -- or miscarriage.
-Okay, we've covered a lot so far.
From Richard Cohen, we learned that a lot's changed
in the way we think about women's biological clocks,
especially since 1978, and from Dr.
Devine, how our reproductive system actually works
and how eggs work.
But I still don't know what that means for me
on a personal level.
Most women just don't know how many viable eggs they have left.
In the next episode, we'll learn how many I have left
and how you can do the same.
Tell me what you think.
Have you ever given much thought to your own fertility?
Tweet me. Sky-write me.
Message in a bottle.
Actually, I would love a letter, like, with a stamp
and, like, a creative drawing of the female reproductive system.
Or you could just scream my name --
"Nicole!"
I'd probably hear you.
Coming up in episode two...
This is when things really get personal.
Ahh.
-Usually when women are 29,
I'm telling them, "You should wait."