Modern Fertility (YC S17) is a proactive way to test fertility at home
modernfertility.com
modernfertility.com
I admit as a career-minded professional, I underestimated how quickly the reproductive window closes biologically and how much higher the risks are for Mom and baby as the years pass.
My wife and I went through IVF and learned quite a bit, e.g.: You may have to wait a year before an insurer will begin to cover treatments or you may have to scrounge for cash to pay for them. Once you find a clinic, there's a multi-month process to get started. Maybe you miss a dose of the IVF drugs due to an illness and have to postpone for a cycle or two. In the case of IVF, you may not get viable embryos or they may not implant. If they do implant, there's a scarily high risk of miscarriage.
And if you want to have more than one child you need to factor in the 40 weeks of pregnancy, recovery, and adjusting to sleep deprivation before you get to start the whole process again. On their own, these are small delays, but compounded they can take up years, and if you're starting in your mid-30s and working with a five-year window, they can make the difference.
It took my wife and me two years of financially and emotionally draining treatments before we had success. Our second run was smoother, but our first child was diagnosed with Leukemia (she's good now) at the start of my wife's 2nd trimester. Had we waited another quarter, it's very likely we would only have had one child. I can say unequivocally in my career there has been no bonus, promotion, or professional recognition that comes close to matching that value.
Despite our challenges, we were lucky. We met a couple that struggled with infertility. Turned out after a lot of testing, the husband was sterile. The wife wanted to carry a child from an egg of hers fertilized by a donor. The man didn't want to raise a child that wasn't his biological offspring, so they split and she had to renter the partner market in her mid-30s under extreme time pressure.
Apologies for the overly personal PSA, but I wish I had this information in my twenties. If you want children, you need to treat the process with all the seriousness you treat your career. This product is a great tool to do so.
I think it is so important for stories like this to be shared and to start a transparent dialogue. We see celebrity pregnancies on the cover of magazines but typically no backstory about what went into them. Thank you.
You know well that this is not possible at all. 'High/medium/low' is about the best you can say. Please don't mislead people in this way and diminish what is otherwise a really good product.
There is no way to count the number of eggs exactly but your statements seem to suggest you do this. This is just wrong - the best you can do is give a very wide range.
Also you say AMH levels are well validated as a proxy for ovarian reserve - the science on this is far from what I’d describe as ‘well validated’. Please speak to 5 gynaecologists and let me know if all 5 agree with your assertion. (That it is the best measure available is not the same as saying it’s wdlk validated, please be clear on this).
Please don't.
Just be honest and try to actually solve the problem of explaining science in layman terms rather than doing away with the explanations and complexity altogether.
I’d certainly use it.
The actual number of babies that have been born worldwide from frozen eggs is only around 2,000, and most of those were done either to prove out the concept or else due to some specific medical condition (e.g. about to get chemo). Despite the fact that you read about it in the news all the time and it feels like everyone is doing it, the number of babies born to women who decided to just pre-emptively freeze their eggs is probably only a couple hundred, accounting for literally 0.00% of babies born each year.
Can you say anything about how you expect these kinds of proactive diagnostics to interact with the existing insurance ecosystem, which tends to pay for diagnosis but varies a lot on treatment?
The only message I got when I was in my early 20s was “you have plenty of time! Make sure you’re established first!” Now it’s very unlikely that I’ll have as many children as I would like, and if I do they’ll have to come in much more rapid succession than I would prefer.
This fall my wife goes over the limit. She might be pregnant with a 12th kid already though, so she'd be excluded. We'd like an estimate of how many more kids we'll end up with.
A histogram would be great, for example: 17% chance of no more, 40% chance of 1 more, 23% chance of 2 more, 11% chance of 3 more, 4% chance of 4 more, 3% chance of 5 more, 2% chance of at least 6 more...
This is really quite different from say testing a mens sperm where you can accurately count the exact number to the nearest million.
Have you compared your accuracy with an HCG test? What is the delta between your home test results and an HCG test?
There is a roundabout way to do this without a sperm sample. Pen prick, blood in a container, ship it out to a lab and then do a karyotype test on it. That'll pick up around 50% of infertility cases. To cover the rest, you'll need to do a sperm test. Also, the 'hook' that gets men in has to be more than just 'check your sperm count'. Men mostly couldn't care less about their sperm count. Something like 'check if you're at risk of passing on a rare blood disease' is a much better hook.
Also your hormones may be fine, but your sperm can still be bad, e.g. your testicles can't get too warm.
Sperm count has been cut in half in the last 40 years in the West. Sperm motility and morphology has also seen precipitous declines, along with increasing DNA fragmentation issues.
Male factor infertility is definitely a problem, but even attempting to discuss environmental estrogens is "men's rights activism" so we ignore it. To the extreme psychological detriment of women who tend to accept blame for fertility failures.
There is a problem in developed countries - that goes far beyond warm testicles - that we are ignoring. For reasons.