Hey readers,
Happy Friday.
After my second failed IVF cycle in 2024, I was again told to use a donor egg. My 43-year old eggs weren’t proving a success. Plus with a negligible AMH, the numbers were not on my side. At 43, the birth rate for women aged 43–44 using their own eggs is 5% per embryo transferred.(HFEA)
So I went to Goa, my winter home, to slowly piece myself back together — rebuilding my health, and, more than that, rebuilding my relationship with my own body after it felt as though two doctors had written it off. Part of that came from reading about the egg’s role in conception, and discovering how far it is from the passive bystander we’ve been told to believe. Four months later, against the odds I’d been given, I became pregnant (via a known donor).
I don’t know why that pregnancy happened and I won’t pretend that reading about egg biology caused it. We never know what specific factors spark conception. What the insights changed was how I saw myself — it gave me back a sense of my body as capable.
Which brings me to today’s piece: an extract from Milli Hill’s fifth book, The Body Myth, out July 16th. It exposes the stories we’ve been told about the female body — declared defective, pathologised, controlled — and replaces them with a different narrative: that women are powerful and whole exactly as we are. The section below, on the egg, is what changed my thinking.
You can pre-order the book with a 40% discount.
Over to Milli.
‘She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ Genesis 2: 23
One way of sending out little pew-pew-pews is by simply writing a narrative in which the most powerful type of person is male and then making sure that narrative is spread far and wide. There’s a meme that does the rounds on social media of a woman holding a placard at a feminist protest that reads: ‘I didn’t come from your rib, you came from my vagina.’ It’s funny because it’s a reversal of the biggest lie ever told: the two largest world religions, Christianity and Islam, both teach that Eve was made by a male God out of Adam’s rib. The idea that the first woman was born from a man’s body is obviously the complete opposite of what we all know to be reality, but it’s certainly an effective way of setting out the stall of patriarchy and positioning men as the ones with the most important power of all – the power to create.
Even when Eve does give birth to her first child later in the book of Genesis, the Bible tells us she says, ‘With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.’ This Eve – to blame for temptation, sin and the Fall from paradise, and condemned to be ‘ruled over’ by her husband and experience painful childbirth – has definitely got things off to a terrible start for the Sisterhood. And her story, still told to little boys and girls around the world today, reinforces the idea of ‘Woman’ as weak, secondary, powerless and culpable. How many little girls who hear it must feel that, given the choice, they would rather be Adam?
The idea that the power of creation belongs to men is by no means confined to religion. Another story you may well have learned in school is that of the heroic sperm’s epic journey or ‘race’ to fertilise the egg. In fact, if you go on to Google right now and do an image search for ‘cartoon sperm and egg’, you will find illustrations of this, perhaps reminiscent of your teenage biology lessons: the egg is depicted wearing lipstick, perhaps with a flower in her hair, batting long eyelashes and gazing coyly at the sperm, who is shown flexing his biceps, wearing cowboy hats or superhero capes, and looking cool in sunglasses. The sperm is ‘active’ – he will get the prize of the egg if he is the strongest and fittest and wins the race, while the egg is passive, and simply waits for her hero to arrive. Just like Eve, the egg is a character that ‘things happen to’; she is a supporting actor in the story. Creation is not her business.
This story – of action-hero sperm and passive egg – illustrates brilliantly how the patriarchal desire to claim the territory of creation is written into our understanding of our very biology. In fact, anthropologist Emily Martin was the first to recognise how, linguistically at least, our conception story betrays our social assumptions about gender roles, in her 1991 essay The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles.
Now, thanks to recent advances in understanding, science has caught up with Martin’s critique: the egg is not passive at all. She has her own journey – and if we want to create a narrative of winners and losers (which, arguably, is also quite patriarchal), then she is also a winner. The female ovaries contain little sacs, called follicles, where there are always eggs in different stages of development. Each month, around ten of these follicles start to get bigger and stronger, and if you wanted to frame the story this way, you could think of this as a competition – which follicle will become dominant and release the winning egg?
Imagine them all, wearing sunglasses and vest tops and pumping barbells in their little training follicles, and then, suddenly, one of them triumphs, and with one last flex of her biceps, pops out of her follicle and is taken up by the fallopian tube. The fallopian tube, by the way, is another part of female reproductive anatomy that ‘does stuff’ – rather than just being a highway from the ovary to the uterus, the fallopian tube has ‘fimbriae’, finger-like projections that catch the egg as it is released.How do they do this? They are lined with hair-like structures called cilia and, at ovulation, they move in closer to the ovary and beat the cilia in rapid motion, sweeping up the egg into your fallopian tubes. Which, as you might recall, are named after a man – sixteenth century Italian anatomist Gabriele Falloppio.
The egg could be thought of, then, a bit like the sperm, as active and strong, as a winner. OK, OK, I hear you say, but once she’s in the fallopian tube, she waits for her hero, right? Not so. Without the egg, the sperm would, quite literally, be lost – because it’s progesterone, released by ovarian cells, that stimulates the sperm and attracts them towards the egg. This chemical signal from the egg causes sperm to be ‘hypermotile’ – stronger and wrigglier and, basically, better swimmers. Without this, sperm would lack the strength to reach and fertilise the egg.
And there’s more: scientists are now beginning to understand that the egg may actually play an active role in choosing which sperm to attract. In a process known as ‘cryptic female choice’, the egg’s follicular fluid gives off chemical signals that can influence which sperm are selected and therefore able to reach them. In a study on mice, it was shown that the eggs showed a preference for sperm from less-related males. In humans, studies have shown that different eggs will have different preferences, with some eggs being better at attracting sperm from one male, while a different egg from a different female was better at attracting sperm from a different male. All of these relatively recent discoveries about the role of the egg have surprised scientists. Professor Daniel Bryson, the senior author of the 2020 study that showed this microscopic selection process, said, ‘The idea that eggs are choosing sperm is really novel in human fertility.’
This novelty may at least in part be down to the male-centred narrative that humans have for so long superimposed: even at a cellular level, we have assumed the male is more active, dynamic and powerful. And it’s not just the egg that plays a part in conception – the female body works in a variety of ways to ensure that only one sperm cell with intact DNA makes it to the egg. The vaginal fluids, which if you’re female you may have observed are more slippery and stretchy around ovulation time, become thinner, less acidic, and also greatly increase in volume – you’ll produce around ten times as much fluid on fertile days as on other days of your cycle – all allowing sperm to move better and live longer in the vagina. But your vaginal fluid can be hostile to sperm, too – in a similar way to the egg’s follicular fluid, it will also filter out sperm that have a closer genetic profile to your own. Your cervix may then play a role in selecting the fittest sperm: it contains tiny grooves which the sperm swim up, and those with abnormal shapes don’t travel through the grooves as easily, getting flushed back out by the vaginal fluid.
And, if and when a sperm does make it past the mighty egg’s rigorous selection process, then she has a few finishing tricks – including initiating a reaction in the head of the sperm to allow it to fuse with her outer matrix, known as the ‘zona pellucida’, which it does by gently ‘spooning’ with her, according to developmental biologist Scott Gilbert – a process of ‘melting together’, rather than the violent penetration that is often described. Once this has happened, the egg then quickly pulls up the drawbridge, so to speak, by changing the structure of the zona pellucida so that no further sperm can gain access.
Every story you are told about the female body, even if it’s presented as ‘science’, bears further scrutiny. Even as I’ve researched the last few paragraphs, I’ve had to search extensively to discover more about the female role in conception, with so many articles and pieces of research written with the sperm always playing the protagonist and the egg barely getting any of the lines.
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