Dr. Lucky Sekhon

And even though in your 20s you're told you're in your reproductive prime years, nobody has perfect eggs all of the time.

And sometimes you're going to ovulate an egg that's not healthy or maybe it's a healthy egg, but the window of timing was off, right?

Because there's like a two to three day window where it's even high yield to try right before you ovulate.

Not every egg is capable of fertilization.

Even when we do IVF and we try to inject sperm directly into each egg, we say maybe 70% to 80% of the time the egg will fertilize successfully.

And only about half of fertilized eggs turn into an embryo, which takes about a week.

At that point, that embryo should be implanting in the uterus.

But we know even at that stage, lots of embryos might have typos or genetic errors.

And that might lead to it not implanting after all of that.

Or it might implant for a little bit and then stop growing.

That's the number one cause of miscarriage in the first trimester.

And so in your 20s, even then, you have about 20% to 25% chance of an embryo that forms from your eggs

having missing or extra DNA and leading to those types of issues.

So it might take several rounds of just randomly ovulating an egg.

And I named my book The Lucky Egg because it really is a random ovulation.

As much as we can talk about the science and the stats, there is some element of luck and serendipity.

And this explains why, okay, as you age, right, your chance of ovulating an unhealthy egg increases.

At 35, we say, OK, now it's gone from maybe a quarter of embryos resulting from your eggs having these errors or typos to about a third.

And at 37, 38, maybe 50%.

And at 40, maybe two thirds are going to be in that bucket where it can be harder and take more ovulations to get there.