Earlier this week I heard a story on NPR regarding a fantabulous new invention: a pill that prevents ovulation, thus preventing pregnancy early in life, and theoretically saving up the woman’s eggs until she wants to have a baby, so she’ll have a better chance of getting pregnant than a woman who let her eggs all go to waste during her 20s and 30s.
I thought that’s what birth control already pills did. Am I totally wrong? What’s the difference between the old birth control pill and the new?
normal birth control does not prevent ovulation, like the new birth control you mentioned, instead, it prevents the implantation of a fertilized egg, through manipulation of hormones, and thus the uterus lining…if i’m not mistaken.
Why would saving the eggs increase the chance of pregnancy later in life? I didn’t think women became less fertile as they aged because they were running out of eggs …
Arjuna34
I spent about 15 minutes searching the NPR archives and found nothing that fits the description you gave. But I’d be happy to look again if you will provide me with a specific link.
I heard this report. Women have a finite number of eggs (a thousand and something?) that they begin to release, and as one gets older there are fewer and fewer good ones. With the regular pill as already was said you do release eggs every month which are sloughed off (sorry about that term, ewwww) as the body isn’t triggered to let it ‘latch on’ in the uterus. Or this is my understanding. A bit better than WAG.
Women do have a finite number of eggs, but it’s in the tens of thousands. More than enough for lifetime. Older women become infertile as their eggs age, becoming less viable. All the eggs a woman will ever have she is born with, so you can see the problems involved in 40 year old eggs. After a point menopause begins and no amount of remaining eggs will help you then. Hormones, maybe.
Yes, but since only 12 per year are used, a woman only needs 360 to go from 10 years old to 40. My impression was that there are fewer good ones left in a woman’s 30’s because they’re all old (and most of them didn’t age well), not because there’s not many left. A woman’s ovaries each has thousands of eggs (one reference: http://www.onhealth.com/conditions/resource/conditions/item,438.asp ).
Taking this pill for 5 years, for example, would only save 5*12 = 60 eggs, out of thousands. And those saved eggs are still aging, so saving them doesn’t change at all the proportion of good to bad eggs.
I still don’t see how this pill could help. Even if it did save a few eggs, they’re still aging, and at the end you have the same ratio of good-to-bad eggs, just (slightly) more total eggs (of which there’s plenty).
Arjuna34
Ack, my link got messed up, and on top of that dragonlady beat me to the punch 
The link didn’t post correctly because there’s a comma in it- just cut and paste the whole thing, and include the “438.asp” at the end …
Arjuna34
the “normal” pill does keep the egg from being released (though if it is realeased, also cuts down on the odds of implantation–the problem with fertilization in older women is the age of the eggs, not the number left.
there are sorts of birth control in the works that do prevent not only ovulation, but also menstruation, keeping the number of mentrual periods down to 3-4 a year. the point of this is not convenience (though i think this is a perfectly good reason) but health–women were never meant to menstruate 12 times a month for 40 years. “back in the day” (read: pre industrial revolution) women began menstruating later, had more children, breastfed them longer, and entered menopause earlier. all of this cut down on the number of periods a woman experienced in her lifetime.
scientists are now speculating that menstrutating as much as we do is actually dangerous. the more times the uterine lining has to be built up and slough off (eww again) and the more monthly changes the breasts have to go through, the more cell reproductions occur. the more cell reproductions that occur, the more room for error–for mutations–for cancer.
the hope is that the new birth control methods under development (much like the pill, but absorbed through the mucus membranes, and therefore of a lower dose) will cut down on periods, on cell reproductions, on mutations, and therefore on cancer. specificallly breast, uterine and ovarian, i think.
there was a good article on this in the new yorker about 4-5 months ago, entitled “john rock’s error” (john rock was one of the scientists behind the development of the original pill, who felt that it was natural that women menstruate 12 times per year).
I just listened to the report and think I can shed some light on the subject. The report does not say that the pill would prevent ovulation per se, but rather would prevent the bodies signal to begin releasing eggs (presumably at puberty). This is an important distinction because as has been pointed out, preventing ovulation for 30 years only saves about 400 eggs. However, preventing the signal to start the ovaries normal cycling can have other effects besides stopping ovulation. As a girl goes through life there are a couple of mass egg deaths that normally take place in the ovary. One happens at puberty and presumably would be prevented by this pill. If I am remembering correctly, the signal begins a cascade of cellular interactions that result in many eggs dying and a decrease in the fitness of the surrounding tissues. This is one reason why older eggs are of lower quality. They have spent more time surrounded by tissues of lower fitness. Theoretically, if the ovary never undergoes this egg death, it will still have plenty of high quality eggs when the signal to begin egg release is given later in life due to the greater overall fitness of the whole ovary. This is still just a theory, but it is being investigated.
John