At the age of 40 you will have approximately:

Based on your age, your ovarian reserve has decreased from 360,000 at puberty to about 18,000.

By age 40 most women have only about 3% left of their original ovarian reserve. As a woman ages, the number and quality of eggs will decrease, which may affect your chances of a successful live birth.

At birth most women have approximately 590,000 eggs, which falls to about 360,000 by puberty.

Every woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have, and as you age, the number of eggs in your ovaries decreases.

Ovarian reserve is a term used to describe the number of eggs left in a woman’s ovaries. A woman’s ovarian reserve shrinks by over a thousand eggs every month. While not directly linked to egg quality, it does correlate with your likelihood of falling pregnant.

Please note that these estimates are based on a prediction model and may not apply to all women.

Your chance of a successful IVF at 40 years old

At this stage your chances of getting pregnant with your own eggs is less than half versus using a donor egg or your own eggs frozen in your 20s. IVF can improve pregnancy chances, but age remains a crucial factor.

IVF does help improve chances of pregnancy across the age ranges, however, age is still a large factor in determining success, both in general terms of getting pregnant, and in terms of the age of the eggs being used.

As a woman gets older, the chance of her getting pregnant with her own eggs decreases, and using eggs frozen when she was younger, or younger donor eggs, may be more successful.