When a baby girl is the size of a sweet potato—about 10 inches from head to toe in her mother’s womb—she has the most eggs she will ever have in her entire life.
By the time she’s born, those 6 to 7 million eggs will have dropped to about 1 or 2 million. And by the time she’s 27.5—the average age an American woman has her first child—only 200,000 remain, if she’s lucky.
Most people, and especially most men, don’t think about those odds until they’re sitting in a fertility clinic.
That was the case for Travis Potter. In 2022, the then–40 year-old Wall Street hedge-fund manager and his wife, 37, had spent months in IVF clinics, and tens of thousands of dollars on hormonal treatment, trying to have a second kid.
