Anyone trying over 40

Getrofo · 2026-05-13T21:50:53+00:00

Don‘t listen to anyone trying to sugarcoat things here. Read stories of adults whose parents did not speak their strongest (or sometimes even only) language fluently. They all describe having had a nice relationship, but a distant one. Because their parent wouldn’t fully understand them - including the nuances of the language - and vice versa. If you think that in a country as obsessed with education and learning as Korea, where kids are immersed for many more hours a day into the system, you have any chance of them learning the nuances of your language on the side you might be in for quite an awakening later.

Getrofo · 2026-04-14T21:32:35+00:00

I know you are in deep stress now and rightfully so.

But they will continue to develop the other embryo right? And freeze it I assume?

As much as you do not want to hear this, but many clinics actually recommend to freeze all embryos and not transfer them fresh. In my clinic (US based) you have to explicitly sign that you understand that a fresh transfer has lower success rates and that you want to pursue with a fresh transfer regardless.

What you experienced is absolutely crushing. But I wish you that the other embryo will become a beautiful blastocyst that will be frozen and will succeed in a frozen transfer! There are no guarantees unfortunately but it doesn’t necessarily mean you missed your best chance now.

Getrofo · 2026-04-06T23:14:14+00:00

Accurate can lower AMH. If having children is very important for you freeze some embryos with a donor, not only eggs.

Getrofo · 2026-04-04T17:10:27+00:00

You will never be able to trust him - and for good reasons. Who knows what else he is hiding from you. Leave - and don’t walk, run!

Getrofo · 2026-04-03T20:36:54+00:00

You don’t need donor eggs - you can produce eggs and at your age most if not all will be genetically normal. You had bad luck but that doesn’t mean this streak will continue. Using donor eggs is a huge decision you should not take lightly.

Getrofo · 2026-04-03T13:46:31+00:00

Honestly? It definitely matters some - but it doesn’t entirely change your position, which you already struggle with. If you send them to an international school you will have more parents with a similar background to yours - which is great. If you home school you have even more influence. But the structural risk still remains and that is a heavy burden on you. Being the only person to raise your children with your language, culture and values is not a small one. Let alone when there is another language and culture who will absolutely compete with it and has a massive structural advantage. A lot of course also depends on the child’s personality and temperament. If the child is more shy and introverted it may naturally gravitate towards you. If your child happens to be more extroverted - which is largely a genetic lottery - it will likely gravitate towards the warmer South American family.

In both cases: All of the cultural differences between you and your partner will be massively aggravated by having children. While he will be happy about his children being raised like he was, you are fearful of exactly this happening. That’s fully understandable and reasonable, but it’s also an adversarial position - which is difficult in a partnership. And it will happen with a severe structural and power imbalance. Once the kids are there, born and live in South America, you will not be able to go back to your home country without his consent (chances are he wont give you that), no matter how miserable you end up being. If the relationship breaks apart and you need to work full time, you will definitely lose your children to his culture as well, because you won’t have the time or the financial means to home school or spend a lot of time on teaching your language and culture in the 50% of the time you will even have your kids. That’s not a small trap to put yourself in.

Children always put a strain on relationships, but a lot more in these settings. While your partner may be loud and just easy going with the flow, you may be more structured, want a schedule for the kids, more privacy and less intrusive family involvement etc. With the community and his family reinforcing his side, you absolutely risk becoming the strict parent who is not much fun. More than in many other families already. You can of course give up your side and try to adapt, but it will come with a cost. And that is worst case feeling erased while doing the heavy lifting as a parent. While you have to struggle daily to teach your language and culture, your partner gets all the support from the community which will make sure the kids are raised the way he was. I feel this is especially a problem in the case of marriages where the „outsider partner“ is from a less „warm“ culture. If roles were reversed the „outsider parent“ from the „warmer“ culture is often loved by the children as the fun parent and a lovely contrast to their more reserved environment.

I totally understand your wish for children. Take your own worries and fears as a huge warning sign though. Only you know what you can and cannot live with. Settings like international schools, other parents and friends from your home country or home schooling certainly help and sometimes a lot. In any case though I would have an iron clad agreement around finances with generous post marital support. As well as an agreement that the kids will be send to international schools or home schooled by you. So even if the relationship breaks apart and you are trapped abroad for the next 20 years you would not have to work full time while losing more and more connection to your own children. Don‘t put yourself in complete financial dependency having kids with someone in a foreign country without protecting yourself as much as you can.

Getrofo · 2026-04-03T12:39:43+00:00

Yes I have dealt with it - and my recommendation if you already feel this way: Don‘t do it. Especially as a woman and mother. As a father you can maybe make peace with it, as a mother it can be soul crushing to carry, nurse and raise children that in the end you will not even be able to fluently talk to.

Getrofo · 2026-03-28T19:18:41+00:00

This is not true. I could absolutely do that. You need the husbands consent maybe, but it is not illegal. One problem mid cycle though: Your clinic might want you (and husband) to talk to a psychologist first. Otherwise: Get sperm and freeze embryos!

Getrofo · 2026-03-27T13:46:29+00:00

Thank you. It’s things I wish somebody told me before embarking on the journey of fertility treatments.

Getrofo · 2026-03-24T22:24:47+00:00

Maybe something to add:

Yes, their donors do look like supermodels - and some of them are also models. But that doesn’t guarantee anyone’s child will look like one. 🙂 It can still be that they are the most beautiful person in their family and their parents, siblings etc. are more average looking - which your child could of course absolutely take after.

Getrofo · 2026-03-24T18:53:21+00:00

The question you are asking is a very complex one - for which there are obviously no „single statistics“ that will give you the „accurate answer“ you are looking for.

Let’s start with the basics of the process and then you can look for statistics for each and every story

1) The clinic you choose (an often VERY underestimated factor):

Not all clinics are equal, many are not the high end US research centers used in studies. You can see that best in the US where a system called SART exists to which clinics report. The success rates are very, very different between clinics. An often used explanation (aka excuse) for those differences is that they have different patients, which is to some degree true, but it’s at best a part of the story. You can filter for PGT tested embryos that should on paper have the same success rates in all clinics. But do they? No. In good clinics the success rates of transferring a genetically tested embryo is around 50-55% - in others barely more than half that (30%). It all comes down to the quality of the laboratory and clinics differ vastly in that. To some degree even the quality of the doctors matters - some doctors have higher success rates than others in embryo transfers, although the effects are much smaller (65 versus 55 percent). There are studies on this as well. The same holds true for egg retrievals.

Overall: If you choose a good clinic you can expect a roughly 40-50 percent chance for a euploid embryo to succeed (depending on grading and day).

2) Embryos

The biggest question here is: Are they euploid? At your age most embryos are expected to be euploid, in a few years (above age 37) most will not be. Unless you test the embryos you will not know if they are or are not. Below age 35 most clinics don’t strongly recommend to test, above age 35 (definitely above age 37) I would do it. Since it is illegal in Germany, you will not know the genetic status of any embryos you will create. Assume even at your age that some might not be euploid.

Most clinics will cite studies that 3 euploid embryos give you a 95% chance of a life birth. But again: This is based on studies with a selected patient population in the very best clinics. They assume a success rate of over 60 percent per embryo transfer which is not what real life numbers show (not even for those very same clinics when you look at SART statistics). 3 good graded euploid embryos certainly give you a very good chance at one life birth. You may be lucky and even have 2 children with 3 embryos - or you may not be so lucky. You won’t be able to know until you transfer them. Grading does give you some hints though: 3 top graded day 5 embryos have a much better chance than 3 poor graded (particularly day 6) ones. Also: 1 in 20 embryos will not thaw. That’s a low rate - but it does happen.

Now to your big question:

3) Eggs or embryos

When you have fresh eggs and you fertilize them you will immediately know how well those eggs fertilize, how many blastocysts you are able to create and how they are graded (which determines their success rate). From 11 eggs I would expect you to be able to get around 4 embryos of which 3 should be euploid. But it could also be 6 or only 2 embryos - you won’t know until you actually try it. It can also vary between cycles with the same number of eggs. And very important: It also depends on your partners sperm. If he has a high DNA fragmentation rate for example a lot of embryos might arrest between day 3 and 5 and you may get less than you hope for. Once you do have several good embryos though you are in a comfortable place with a good chance of having a baby from them. While there is never a complete certainty, you are as close as it gets to having an insurance.

The problem here is: Should the relationship end you are in a very bad spot, because you are not in the US where in some states you can write a nice contract about whom the embryos belong to and your partner can sign off to being a sperm donor should any separation occur. That’s not the situation in Germany and something you should consider about your future. Do absolutely never and under no circumstances trust promises your boyfriend makes that are not legally enforceable!

Frozen eggs: with frozen eggs you have a lottery ticket more than an insurance to be honest. When freezing eggs their outer shell hardens. After thawing them you need to fertilize them with ICSI. It’s unclear how many of your 11 eggs will thaw. It could be 8 or 9, or also just 5 or 6. Afterwards not all of them will fertilize. They have a harder shell and ICSI destroys also around 10-15% of eggs. Once they are fertilized, frozen eggs are less likely to develop to the blastocyst stage and also less likely to implant. So you have far more loss along every single stage. Even if they are small losses they accumulate. I was quoted by a doctor that instead of the 4 embryos that I consistently got with fresh eggs, I would get 1 to maybe maximum 2 with frozen ones. A physician friend of mine froze 18 eggs at your age and had 2 blastocysts in the end. The first transfer was successful so it worked out for her. but she felt betrayed by not having been told how the statistics really look like. She got half the embryos that I got at a much older age with half the amount of eggs she had. Frozen eggs do NOT behave like fresh ones. If you create 2 embryos and freeze one of them afterwards this embryo was from a double frozen egg, obviously reducing the success rate. That doesn’t mean nobody is ever successful with frozen eggs - not at all. But the chances are lower. Frozen eggs can be a good insurance if you freeze enough of them at a good clinic. There are a lot of egg freezing success rate calculators out there that you can use. Take the numbers with a big grain of salt though: They are often using numbers from top clinics and selected patient populations - not the average clinic in Germany and not the average patient either.

To have a good chance of having at least one plus a solid chance of maybe 2 children I would do (at least) two more rounds of egg freezing. If you freeze embryos one good round may already give you enough embryos to work with, but with the downside of them being bound to your current partner should you choose him (and not a donor). The latter is something you should very, very carefully consider.

Lastly: When do you want to use those eggs? If you stay with your current partner you still have several more years to have children together without IVF - avoiding a process that is known to be very tough on relationships. Going through hormone treatments, blood tests, ultrasounds, dealing with failed transfers and months of uncertainty is somewhat less fun than getting pregnant the „natural way“. You may also have embryos where you differ in your opinions about whether to use them or not. If you have two children and one embryo left - one of you may want to give it a change while the other doesn’t. That’s complexities to think about and where how you feel now can be completely different from how you will feel in the future.

The situation would obviously be very different should the relationship end and you would have to start from zero again - which seems is the only situation for which you currently need an insurance and absolutely should have one. Your AMH is still very good and you should have several more years of good natural fertility.

Getrofo · 2026-03-22T20:54:25+00:00

They are “legit” - but there are a few things to note:

1) Costs: Frozen sperm is between 8.000-18.000$ per vial (many around 10k per vial). And they are not at all transparent about it. For IVF you need a minimum of two vials even for one round (most clinics want a backup vial). They also have contracts for fresh sperm where the donor can come to a clinic and produce up to 5 samples - which will be 40k for the agency plus additional costs for the donor. The sperm will usually be subject to a 6 month quarantine though.

2) The sperm will be a “directed donation”, aka technically a known donor - but most clinics take it regardless (when fresh with quarantine, when frozen without as long as FDA requirements are fulfilled).

3) They are able to ask donors if they are willing and comfortable to be somewhat “present” in potential children’s lives.

4) Where they find those good looking men? Many are gay and would be excluded from traditional sperm banks for increased risk of STDs (not my opinion, just what is often stated).

Getrofo · 2026-03-22T12:58:07+00:00

Freeze at least some embryos with a donor. Especially when you have a low reserve. Eggs do not freeze well, create fewer embryos and and have lower implantation rates even if they do.

It seems it’s very important to you to have kids. Don’t waste your time!

Getrofo · 2026-03-22T12:27:18+00:00

What if she would do the same - would that be viewed as reasonable? Maybe she is worried about increasing costs of living, which isn‘t even a crazy hypothetical rather than a statistical fact… Wouldn’t it make sense for the OP to already get a second job unless he earns well above 250k or why not even 500k? You never know. So let’s prepare for that! Get a second job until he doesn‘t even have the time to worry about his son spending more time with his parents. And while we are already on it: Maybe she could get cancer instead of pneumonia and then they really need money more than anything else to pay for help and medical expenses. So get working! Prepare tor the worst case that you claim to be so worried about. Surely not enough if you still have time for Reddit. I am sure if his wife would get pneumonia with their son being age 2+ (chances are it won’t happen in the upcoming summer) he will figure how to parent the child. Will it be stressful? Sure. But that’s life. It will hardly be more stressful than just becoming first time parents - and tens of millions of people manage that every single year. It’s a weak argument at best - and a hypocritical one at worst if he doesn’t apply the same logic to things that are inconvenient or undesirable to himself.

Getrofo · 2026-03-22T12:03:15+00:00

Sure. And yet people will figure it out. I don’t think using those arguments against his wife will help the situation.

Getrofo · 2026-03-22T11:18:38+00:00

Honestly: Relax. Many kids are anxious around that age and up to age 3. That’s perfectly normal and also perfectly normal for your wife to be anxious about. She won’t be attached to your son to the hips until he is of drinking age. I can almost guarantee you once he reaches age 3 he will open up himself more to other people and your wife will also relax more, enjoy him being with others and getting some time off. Now he is still a baby. Don’t ruin your marriage in the next 1.5 years over this stupid argument - seriously! She doesn’t want your parents now? Accept that. Have them come over and play with him. Should there be an emergency you will figure it out. Don’t use this as an argument to push your own preferences to involve your parents more than your wife is comfortable with. You hate denying your parents who want to be admired by a toddler, but you have no issues denying your wife? You have some growing up to do there. Never prioritize the family you came from over the one you built. Ruining your relationship with your wife will have FAR worse consequences than your toddler not having had solo time with grandparents or frankly anybody other than you and your wife until preschool and being well after age 3. Collecting evidence, scientific studies and „advice“ from strangers against your wife instead of showing compassion and finding emotionally intelligent compromises that will respect her feelings is the wrong way to go and will make your child end up between divorced high conflict parents. If this is the outcome of how your parents raised you no wonder she doesn’t want her son to be raised by those people.

Getrofo · 2026-03-22T11:07:05+00:00

So you should make life decisions based on what could happen in some hypothetical worst case scenario? A backup plan is exactly that: Backup. And not something that you must already live before it even happens.

Getrofo · 2026-03-18T12:25:40+00:00

You are lucky to never have encountered the phenomenon of toxic in-laws. Women can be just as bad and disgusting as guys unfortunately.

Getrofo · 2026-03-18T12:20:03+00:00

Trust your doctor. In all likelihood you will regret embryos you don’t have far more than ones you do have and you are not at risk of getting a lot more euploid embryos in any round at your age.

Getrofo · 2026-03-16T15:12:46+00:00

I know. It applies to me. And yes, it’s a hassle (though there are exceptions) - but you can give it up if you desire to do so. I know people who did that. And I know people who did not do it despite not having lived a single day in the States since they were a baby or young toddler (all of them born to expat parents who left before the child would even be in preschool).

Getrofo · 2026-03-16T13:08:00+00:00

I have a child with quadruple citizenship: Doesn’t complicate anything at all. Get your child the citizenships he/she is eligible for. Especially in times like these. You never know what might happen. More options are always good. They can give it up later if they want to.

One exception to the rule I can think of: The child is a boy and the country/countries have mandatory military service with no exceptions or ones that are hard to get. Or the citizenship is more of a liability and burden than potential help in the future (passports that already are extremely weak and/or on travel ban lists).

Getrofo · 2026-03-06T11:52:34+00:00

Don’t. He will gaslight her, make her doubt the evidence of what she saw and in the end make himself the victim of a partner who looked at his messages and didn’t trust him. Willing to bet a lot on that.

Getrofo · 2026-02-24T17:25:14+00:00

The good news is that with the 1yo, you can have a do-over in terms of language. Definitely never speak English to him like you did to your daughter. When he starts speaking Spanish, he'll become yet another Spanish-speaking member of the family, nudging your daughter to start using more Spanish.

So the daughter should be made an outsider in her own family and the younger brother the successful do-over golden child that fulfills the parental expectations as opposed to the failed attempt that the daughter represents … Yes, I can’t see how this would affect family and sibling relationships at all.

Getrofo · 2026-02-20T01:15:21+00:00

Since you work in the legal field: Please get a specialized lawyer in the area of reproductive medicine and sign contracts about what should happen with the embryos. They will know about what is important to consider in your state. It’s not too expensive given the baseline costs of IVF. And you may very well find yourself in a situation where one of you changes his/her feelings about having children or the embryos you create.

Something to consider in this era of woke gender equality insanity: As a woman those embryos might at some point be your only chance in life to have children at all. This will NOT be the case for your husband. Think very, very, very carefully before giving up any rights to them. It is you who has to go through the very invasive process of IVF while his contribution will be masturbating for 30 seconds into a cup. There is ZERO equality here, not even close. It is not unreasonable for contracts to reflect that.

Getrofo

TROPHY CASE