Quantity vs. Quality

Since I am a woman in my thirties who does not yet have children, any news about fertility seems to capture my attention lately. A few days ago, a new study on female egg reserves received lots of media coverage. In case you missed it, here's a link to a GMA interview on this topic:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/women-fertility-falls-lose-90-percent-eggs-30/story?id=9693015

Note the title: For Women Who Want Kids, 'the Sooner the Better': 90 Percent of Eggs Gone By Age 30. While it is interesting that a female begins life with all the eggs she will ever have (on average 300,000 potential egg cells) and the number remaining each month seems to decrease exponentially, the rapid decline in and of itself is not worrisome to me. After all, women only produce one (possibly two) mature eggs per month anyway (meaning only 400 or so eggs ever reach maturity). Thus, in my opinion, the bigger issue seems to be the quality of eggs available each month not the quantity. The following article supports my opinion:

http://www.advancedfertility.com/eggquantityquality.htm

Of course, as indicated in the article, quantity certainly is a factor when doctors perform ovarian stimulation; however, assuming that eggs reaching maturity have been randomly selected, the percentage of high-quality eggs available matters much more than the number of eggs available. If a female begins with a high percentage of high-quality eggs and is able to prevent external factors from decreasing their quality as she ages (http://www.womens-health.co.uk/egg_age.html), then it follows that she likely will become pregnant at an older age even though she has a much smaller supply of eggs from which to randomly choose.

Now, wasn't that a fun post!?!