We all know how fully loved up Kourtney Kardash and her partner, Blink-182 drummer, Travis Barker, are. The couple are so obsessed with each other that it’s become a running joke on the TV reality show, The Kardashians, that the two are never not sitting on each other/kissing/a mix of the two.
And Kardashian has shared publicly about how she and Barker have been trying for a child for a while now to add to their extended family.
In episode one of the new series, she takes a five-minute break from filming (it ends up being more like 15!) to go and have sex as she’s ovulating.
She also opened up in the recent episode about the process of freezing her eggs, and how she feels that the reality of the process is far different from how it’s portrayed.
A few years ago, before the couple met, Kardashian underwent an egg retrieval process that she documented on the show.
The process retrieved seven healthy eggs, but when it came time to thaw them, none of them survived, meaning that none could be fertilised and turned into an embryo.
“The freezing of the eggs isn’t guaranteed and I think that that’s a misunderstanding,” she said on the episode that aired earlier this week.
“People do it thinking that it’s a safety net and it’s not.”
What is the success rate of egg freezing?
According to Lord Robert Winston, professor of fertility studies at Imperial College London, the number of eggs that go on to become successfully ‘thawed’, fertilised and carried to birth is only around 1%.
Rather than being a bit of added security and buying women time, he describes the whole egg-freezing process as being “a very unsuccessful technology”.
There are lots of elements at play that dictate how successful your egg-freezing attempts will be, like age, the health of your eggs and whether fertilisation is successful.
Age is a huge factor – the BBC reports that women who were under 35 when their eggs were frozen have the highest number of births per treatment cycle, according to HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority) data, and this rate declines with age.
This suggests that a younger, healthier woman could have a higher chance of conception and healthy birth.
In the meantime, Kardashian has decided to give up on IVF entirely and the couple are trying to go down the natural route, using cycle tracking and… well, lots of sex. More power to them! We just can’t wait to find out the future baby’s name…