With all the controversy over when life really begins — is it at conception? is it at birth? — one amazing sex science fact that is never mentioned in this debate is that life, in a weirdly real yet mystical sense, begins long before conception.
Once upon a time, long ago, when your biological mother was born, you were inside a follicle in her ovaries. You — or the seed of you, or more precisely, half the seed of you — let’s call it a demi-seed — were already inside your mother, waiting to be born, years before your father got into the picture.
Let’s go back to the beginning all over again. You know that it takes an ovum (egg produced by women) to join with sperm (male reproductive cells contained in semen) to create life. You may even know that the sperm finds the egg in the fallopian tubes of a woman’s reproductive system. But where did the egg in the fallopian tube come from? How did that egg form?
Half of your genetic material is inside of your mother’s
body from the time she herself is born.
When your biological mother was born, she was already equipped with roughly 1 million ovarian follicles. These are microscopic, hair-like structures in her ovaries. Every follicle holds a single oocyt or immature egg. Those baby eggs contained the DNA that your mother later contributed to your creation when it joined with the DNA in your father’s sperm.
In other words, half of your genetic material is set in place inside of your mother’s body from the time she herself is born. If you are a biological woman, the same is true of you: you were you born with immature eggs in the follicles in your ovaries. It’s ironic that men’s sperm are named for and widely regarded as the “seed” of life. A woman is not the soil in which a man plants his all-important seed. The egg is actually more like a seed of life, while the sperm is more like a secondary companion seed required to make a complete human grow.
In childhood, a girl’s body will prepare for future fertilization by shedding about half the follicles she was born with and reabsorbing them into her system. All the immature eggs they contained die in the process. By the time she reaches puberty, she will have an estimated 400,000 follicles left. Shedding the follicles is a reproductive strategy that literally culls out the bad eggs! Her body self-aborts them and gives the strongest ones their best chance at survival.
So let’s review that: every biological girl baby is born with more immature eggs than teenagers or women have. A girl baby is brimming with untold potentials for new life.
And let’s review this: the body naturally aborts unwanted potential children by killing off half or more of the follicles. I don’t know how far up the womb legislators want to go, but I wonder what they’d say about the fact that all women’s brains direct their bodies to clear out follicles and self-abort the eggs. That’s right, female bodies are wired to trash half their eggs and devote reproductive resources to the remaining half.
Meanwhile, though you may be clued in to a girl’s development by the appearance of pubic hair and breast growth, it’s usually impossible to exactly predict when a girl’s menstrual cycle will begin. Rest assured that, under the surface, her body knows when the time is right. Her reproductive system follows its own biological clock and sets a series of important events in place.
When a girl reaches reproductive age, and adult hormones start circulating, the estrogen produced in her follicles triggers her eggs to mature. Once the first egg is ready to be fertilized, it is released from the follicle and enters the fallopian tubes, which is where it will find incoming sperm to hook up with. Or, usually, not: if she was not fertilized, her body will do a reproductive cleanse. The blood and mucosal tissue that would have supported a baby in the womb will flow out of her vagina. In other words, she gets her period.
Most people take the most visible sign of female puberty, her period, as the sign that “our little girl is a woman now.” Actually, you missed it: she really became a woman when her first egg matured. Blood is the final stage of that month’s reproductive cycle, and not the beginning of anything except the self-cleansing period.
PARENTING TIP: TALK TO YOUR DAUGHTER ABOUT MENSTRUATION, CONCEPTION, AND PROTECTION at the first sign she may be entering this stage of development. You can alleviate her anxiety about menstruation and prevent unwanted pregnancy through education.
Lest you think I’m forgetting the fathers, hardly. But the biology is all different.
Biologically, the male role is to create new possibilities for life by joining his genetic contribution to the mother’s contribution. When a biological male reaches puberty and his adult hormones kick in, his now fully-developed testes will create sperm. From that point on, sperm are a constantly renewable source in men. In men, it takes between two and half and three months for sperm to grow enough to be ejaculated in semen (the gooey white fluid men ejaculate that holds the sperm) but production itself doesn’t stop until disease or death intervene. Men can produce fresh, fertile sperm at will (unlike women who have no control over when an egg will drop) for the rest of their lives. Men can even produce sperm when they didn’t mean to, such as during nocturnal emissions (spontaneous ejaculations when sleeping) or other spontaneous orgasms.
Although biological men are born with structures to create sperm, the genetic combinations in sperm are always new and unique. Research has shown that every sperm cell has between 25-38 mutations that mix up DNA traits the man inherited from his own parents. So while you get half your DNA from dad, the precise genetic traits you get from him were combined at random before he had the orgasm that impregnated mom.
Another big difference. Women run out of follicles and eggs in their lifetimes, and it’s not uncommon to have empty follicles that don’t contain eggs either. A woman’s fertility is set and specific: women menstruate 12 times a year for about 40-50 years of their lives. Each cycle begins with the egg and ends with her period. When she runs out of eggs (by menopause, usually), her fertility is over. Fertility doctors often perform scans on women who have tried and failed to have kids to determine the state of their follicles and how many still contain viable eggs.
Men never “run out” of sperm. Infertile men have different problems — they may have a low sperm count in their semen or their sperm may move too slowly to successfully fertilize an egg. They still produce new sperm every time they cum, even if the sperm itself has a poorer chance of naturally connecting with an egg.
The aging process also takes a heavy on a woman’s follicles. By their 40s, women begin to run out of viable follicles and the ones that remain are less likely to produce healthy eggs. That’s why older women are are at higher risk of having babies with a chromosomal abnormality, such as we see in Down syndrome kids. By the time a woman reaches perimenopause (the transition period between her years of fertility and the end of fertility), her follicles and eggs may be fully depleted. If she can still get pregnant, the risk of an abnormal pregnancy is high. A woman in her mid-20s has only a 1 in 1200 chance of a Down syndrome baby; that risk jumps to 1 in 10 by age 49.
Aging doesn’t seem to be a big issue for men when it comes to fertility. Researchers have been studying whether elder sperm carries risks of birth abnormalities on the assumption that elderly men likely do have higher risk of producing babies with chromosomal abnormalities. Thus far, studies have been small and inconclusive. Meanwhile, the oldest natural father on record is 96, and the literature is full of reports of men fathering healthy babies in their 80s. So until there is further study, we at least know anecdotally there is potential for men to produce healthy, fertility-fit sperm for their entire adult lives.
I’m delighted by all the little mysteries that haven’t been explained yet. For example, are follicles able to “experience” anything or communicate with a part of the brain or respond to chemical signals from the brain beyond their reproductive function? What about those immature eggs? Is every egg as different from another egg as each sperm cell is different from another? Why are women born with twice as many follicles as they will end up keeping? How does the body decide which follicles will die? Did the follicle that produced me have to sabotage its neighbor to win that little evolutionary battle? Is it a “follicle eat follicle” kind of world deep in mothers’ wombs? Seriously, I need to know!
It’s of particular personal interest to me because my mom was a Holocaust survivor. I’m very familiar with studies that have shown that the stress and trauma in Holocaust survivors were passed down genetically to their children, though spontaneous changes to their DNA. I wonder whether a mother’s life experiences and traumas could also reach so far into the womb as to deform or otherwise change immature eggs too. The idea that half of my future identity was already inside my mother’s ovaries during the Holocaust blows my mind.
And that’s what entrances me about this sex fact. It’s the idea that a once-microscopic piece of me was always inside of my mother, that the traits I inherited from her, like my eye-color and my height, were fixed not just since my creation but also since her creation, already stored and waiting to grow and ultimately join with a male’s DNA. When I think about how she carried that infinitesimal genetic trace of me since she herself was a baby in her mother’s womb, well, that’s where science bumps into the cosmic and becomes almost mystical in its emotional intensity. I was inside her, moving with her, going through her life with her as a minuscule, insignificant hair in her body all along, from the moment she was carried in her own mother’s body.
Science offers a new and far more empowered way of seeing our the female reproductive and biological processes. The truth shows that women are primary in reproduction, not mere “bearers” of a man’s seed or vessels for his child. Men don’t “give” women babies. Woman hold the essential grain of human identity. They hold US within them, waiting to be born. Men’s contribution is to complete the circle of life, not to dominate it.
