Dr. Marie Wren: Should We All Freeze our Eggs and Sperm?
Meet Dr. Marie Wren
In this, the fourth episode of the Love is Not a List Podcast with Gillian McCallum, she meets world famous fertility expert, Dr. Marie Wren, former Director of the highly regarded Lister Clinic in London.
If you know of a high flyer in London, a global celebrity, or a member of a royal family who has needed assistance with their fertility in the past, then chances are Dr. Wren is someone they have had on speed dial.
With the concept of freezing your eggs being a de rigueur amongst not only the chattering classes, but a standard part of many companies’ offerings to their staff, we ask, is egg freezing something that single women should be doing routinely? And what of single men? Should they be freezing their sperm?
Read the full transcript below of this engaging interview – to find out exactly what happens when Britain’s Top Matchmaker meets Britain’s Top Fertility Expert.
When Gillian McCallum met Dr. Marie Wren
[Gillian McCallum]: Hello and thank you for joining me this week. I am with an incredible expert, the person that you have been so rooting for to appear, because she is the world renowned. Dr Marie Wren.
She is famous amongst every single person who ever really wanted to get pregnant or ever really wanted to have children or work out where they were with their fertility city. All the big names know exactly who she is. And if you haven’t heard of her, she is here today to introduce herself, talk a little bit about all of the expertise that she’s built up over three decades.
My understanding is, and she’ll tell you a little bit more, that Dr. Marie Wren has brought into the world, not personally, individually, but aided men and women throughout the world to have over 20,000 children in her career.
She’s recently retired, which is why this is probably the first time she’s ever had a chance to chat to someone like me, because she’s always been far too busy helping people with their fertility, helping them get pregnant, and helping them achieve their dreams.
Thank you so much for joining me this week.
[Dr Marie Wren]: Thank you, Gillian. It’s lovely to see you again.
The wonders of technology.
[Gillian McCallum]: Absolutely right. And I’m thrilled that you’re here because I want to ask you some of the really tough stuff, some of the brilliant questions.
One of the things that’s going around social media right now, one of the things that lots of women are talking about is the fact that the sperm swims to the egg. So therefore you should make a man work for you rather than the other way around.
Do you think that might be true?
[Dr Marie Wren]: I kind of think that probably in fertility, it’s the same as in life. It has to be a kind of joint partnership. Of course, the egg is moving from the ovary into the fallopian tube, so there is some transit at both ends.
[Gillian McCallum]: Now, one of the things that I’m known for is slightly attaching something to my hat to represent what it is that we’re doing. Of course, as we all know, podcasting is such a visual medium, which is why it’s so important to do this. The thing that I had was an ostrich egg, and I did try to kind of add it on here and it didn’t quite work.
So I might just kind of have to hold it a little bit. And I think also, is it true that the egg is the largest cell in the human body and a sperm is the smallest?
Had you heard that? Is that something that people talk about?
[Dr Marie Wren]: I need to actually check that. But the egg is substantially larger than the sperm.
Yes, absolutely and you can’t have any cells bigger than the egg, but I wouldn’t want to place a very large bet on that.
Motherhood at Any Age
[Gillian McCallum]: So one of the things, you know, that I’m 45 now and I had my first and only darling child a little bit later in life. And there seems to be a sense of a feeling that you can have a child at any time, that now our fertility window is wide open. Certainly we know that Al Pacino and other famous guys have had children very late on. Naomi Campbell very famously recently had her second child and said that you can be a mother at any age.
Is that true? Or is being a parent at any age more to do with how wealthy you are? I get the feeling there might be a financial divide in here, as well as a fertility divide.
What do you think to that?
[Dr Marie Wren]: I think that we all know that women go through the menopause and that you’re not going to have a baby after the menopause unless you have either frozen eggs, frozen embryos, or decided to use donor eggs.
So it’s extremely unlikely that anyone is going to have a baby. A woman is going to have a baby very late in life unless she has involved fertility treatment.
So spontaneous conception isn’t going to occur at a much later age. So, of course, because fertility treatment is not particularly in older women funded on the NHS in the UK, there is obviously going to have to be a financial outlay in order to become a child at a later age.
It raises less likely that uterine factors are significantly affected by ageing, but there might be some impact on that and whether or not that might reduce the implantation rates.
But it’s primarily about the age of the egg. So if you’ve got a 58 year old uterus but a 32 year old egg, then the chances of conception should be similar to a 32 year old uterus with a 32 year old egg. But that has to involve technology.
[Gillian McCallum]: So just thinking this through, if you were an older woman who’s gone through the menopause, you could still carry a baby providing the egg, and potentially sperm are significantly younger.
There’s no limit to how late you could carry a child yourself?
Older Fathers, Poorer Sperm Quality?
[Dr Marie Wren]: Older fathers can still produce sperm that can make a child. We all know that because of the numerous examples of older fathers. But it’s more to do with the age of the egg.
Obviously, if a woman has gone through the menopause, she’s no longer menstruating, and therefore you would need to prepare the uterus using hormone replacement therapy to create an environment that would be appropriate for an implanting embryo. But that is relatively easy. You can do that in women who’ve gone through a premature menopause. You can do that if you’re doing frozen embryo replacement cycles where you are creating an environment with hormone replacement rather than using the natural cycle.
But the rate determining step is obviously going to be the viability of the egg.
[Gillian McCallum]: And so, from what you’ve said, the viability of the egg is the key factor. We know that men can produce sperm ongoing but I think some of the research seems to suggest. It gets more and more damaged over time, is that correct?
And the egg repairs the sperm. Is that correct?
[Dr Marie Wren]: Certainly the egg does have some ability to repair DNA damage in the sperm and that ageing in the man must have some impact.
There’s a suggestion that there are definitely factors that autism may be linked to possibly older fathers.
But the egg is definitely and the age of the egg, that the health of the egg is going to be an incredibly important part in all of this. We know that the rate of miscarriage increases with the age of the egg. We know that the incidence of genetic problems such as down syndrome increase with maternal age.
Obviously, with screening of embryos it’s possible to identify those embryos with genetic abnormalities that would cause a miscarriage or would lead to the birth of a child with a problem such as down syndrome.
So if possible, you’re going to have a greater chance of a successful pregnancy with youthful eggs.
The Importance of Pregnancy Before 42
[Gillian McCallum]: And when we’re talking about on the more useful side of eggs, I know the statistic or the age that people have said for a very long time is you need to get pregnant before the age of 35.
But I had there was some research out that seemed to suggest, well, 41 is more realistic in terms of how we live now and the health that we have now.
From your experience over all of these decades, what’s your experience with regards to age and maternal age?
[Dr Marie Wren]: I think bottom line is that a lot of this comes down to luck. You can be extremely lucky and get pregnant very easily in your early forty s and you can be in your early thirties and have huge difficulties getting pregnant because of recurrent miscarriages, because of maybe that you’re with a man who’s got poor quality sperm.
So it isn’t straightforward. And that’s the difficulty that if you are the extremely lucky woman who did get pregnant without any difficulty later in life, you’re probably quite surprised that people go on and on about how difficult it is.
But I think if you’re looking at populations you will see more pregnancies, fewer miscarriages, a lower incidence of problems such as down syndrome in a younger population.
Should All Women Freeze Their Eggs?
[Gillian McCallum]: And of course it’s kind of I don’t want to say trendy, maybe that is the right word, maybe not to go for egg freezing. Freeze your eggs is something that I was certainly told to do a lot. Kind of casually over dinner or over drinks. I’ll freeze your eggs as though it was like going to get your hair cut or just kind of a routine everyday thing that we should be doing.
Is it a routine thing that women should be doing? And I’m not saying it shouldn’t be. Is it something that we should be taking charge of our fertility in that way and saying I haven’t found the right partner or the timing hasn’t.
Whatever this set of circumstances is, should more women be feeding them or is it false hope?
Is it false hope for the future?
[Dr Marie Wren]: I think the huge problem obviously seems to be that generally, perhaps in developed countries, women are educated, women have careers, and for many complicated social reasons a lot of women are delaying having a family because maybe they haven’t met the right person, who knows?
But egg freezing isn’t going to be the solution for everyone. But it potentially offers some women the opportunity to have a child later in life if they haven’t met somebody that they want to have a child with at the right time.
Are women fussier? Are men more immature, less likely to want to settle and have children? I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers. As with IVF, not all eggs collected in an IVF cycle will lead to a pregnancy, but some of them will. And the same obviously is going to be true with frozen eggs.
So are you going to regret not doing it or are you going to be disappointed that you did it and it didn’t lead to a successful pregnancy? And herein lies the kind of difficult question that women have to face. And I think talking to women who have considered egg freezing, who have done it, what are their options?
Do nothing, create embryos with donor sperm, either to use them at the time or to freeze embryos created with donor sperm, which then might create the difficulty. Would they use those embryos with a different man? And obviously if you’re using donor sperm as a single woman, you’re embarking on the challenge of being a single parent, which obviously there are going to be women that will embrace that decision because perhaps parenting has often been a female dominated role.
And if you don’t freeze your eggs and you do meet somebody at 45, your chances of getting pregnant through sex are going to be minimal. Your chances of getting pregnant through IVF with your own eggs are minimal. And you might have had an opportunity if you’d met somebody wonderful at 45 with eggs that you’d frozen at 30. If you’d done it not a guarantee, but it might have been an option.
So I suppose women are trying to weigh up can I afford to do this now financially versus will I emotionally regret not doing it? And I think you have to be very clear that none of this is a guarantee of what’s going to happen in the future. But it’s an opportunity.
Egg Freezing Versus Embryo Freezing
[Gillian McCallum]: And is there a difference if a woman is considering freezing her eggs? Is there a difference between the thawing, the transplant, the process of a frozen egg versus a frozen embryo? Does one increase your chances of a live breath at a later stage?
[Dr Marie Wren]: There is a slightly higher risk of cryo damage from an egg than from an embryo. Obviously the embryo has a lot more cells, particularly if you’re freezing the embryo at the blastocyst stage.
Again with the current technology, you know, once you’ve inseminated the egg, whether or not the egg is going to fertilise, you know, if you’ve decided to allow the embryo to develop which embryos stop developing in the lab and obviously, if you’ve made the decision to genetically test the embryos before you freeze them, you then have the information about whether or not the embryos you’re going to keep have the right genetic information to give you a better chance of having a viable pregnancy.
So the potential advantages of freezing an embryo is that you know how many better embryos you’ve got, and therefore, if you end up with just one genetically normal embryo and you don’t think that that is a good enough chance, you could decide to go through the process.
Whereas if you’re freezing eggs, you don’t know if you’ve frozen enough. Now, it’s still possible that you can freeze an embryo that will fail to recover, but you’ve gone further down the path and you’ve excluded from the initial batch of eggs. Those that were not going to fertilise, not going to grow, have the wrong genetics.
So it’s placing a bet on the ground much further around the course.
[Gillian McCallum]: Can you just repeat that sentence just again? Because I just missed it a little bit.
[Dr Marie Wren]: Like placing your bet on the Grand National when you’ve maybe got two or three hurdles to go rather than at the beginning. So if you imagine that you’ve got this enormous set of hurdles to get through by freezing eggs, they’re at the start of that difficult process.
So the start of the grand national. Whereas if you’ve frozen embryos that have been genetically tested, they’re not absolutely guaranteed to make you pregnant, but you’re many more hurdles over the course.
The Benefits of Freezing Embryos
[Gillian McCallum]: And I know it’s probably hard for you to make a recommendation, but from what you’ve said simply there, if I was to pick, I’d be saying freezing embryos, which would get me further along the line, would be better, but again, that would take into account my position.
And as you said earlier, imagine if you use donor sperm, but you then meet a partner later, how will that partner feel about donor sperm?
Well, they say, Yep, that’s not a problem, let’s do that. Or they say, no, I’m not interested in that. It would have to be my own sperm. Why didn’t you just freeze eggs? So then does it put women in a position where they’re thinking, well, do I have to freeze eggs and embryos and how many hormones are going into my body and how much time does this take and how much expense does this take?
It really puts women into a quandary. And I think when I was flippantly saying earlier that it’s like going to the hairdresser and getting a haircut, that’s only for the person suggesting, it not for the person that actually has to go through it.
So I think people very casually throw this out for women to do, not realising how much of a complex and nuanced thing it is to decide, I want to take charge of my fertility, I know I want to take control of it. I haven’t met the right partner or whatever else has happened in my life.
So what do I do? Do I pick the donor? Do I freeze the egg? Do I hope someone will come along later? And then the next part, and then the next part, which is when do I go for it?
When is the time that I’m going to and my mum used to always say to me when I was younger, oh, there’s never a good time to have a child. That’s possibly true. I certainly was pretty heavily pregnant during COVID and COVID didn’t exist when I got pregnant. And then suddenly we’re in bang in the middle of COVID It felt like the worst time on the planet to be having a child. So I imagine lots of people feel that way.
But do you think that puts women off delays a little bit further? The idea of maybe waiting for the right partner or maybe waiting for the right time?
Freezing Your Eggs by 28
[Dr Marie Wren]: Oh, I’m sure that people are going to delay these decisions. It’s fantastic for those people who are lucky enough to have met the right person at a young age and they’re both on the same page and they both want to have children and they get on with it, perfect. But that situation doesn’t exist for everybody. I think if somebody is sure that they want to have a child come what may, then having a child with having a child with a sperm donor is the right thing to do and to get on with it as soon as it’s possible, emotionally and financially.
I think now we would, given that the success rate with egg freezing is not pretty good. Again, if you’re freezing 28 year old eggs, they’re going to give you a better success rate when you come to use them. And then if you’re freezing 38 year old eggs, that by not fertilising the eggs when you’re a single woman with donor sperm, gives you the option of doing that in the future if you’ve still not met somebody or obviously using them with a partner, if you’re lucky enough to meet that partner.
So I think if a woman is fairly sure at that point in her life that she wouldn’t want to have a child on her own, and I think that’s the kind of difficult thing that women have to think about would I have a child on my own if that was the only option available to me?
And that’s the difficult question that men never have to ask themselves that, you know, they can be 40, 50 or 60 and still potentially have a child, provided they’ve got a partner who’s young enough or who froze her eggs at a young enough age?
Male Fertility and Sperm Freezing
[Gillian McCallum]: And that was the question I was going to go on to next, which is we’ve talked quite a bit about female fertility there.
So what about male fertility? You mentioned earlier perhaps higher risk of genetic disorders potentially are linked to autism. We know that plenty of older fathers exist, certainly amongst the celebrities. Should men consider freezing their sperm for reasons other than having cancer or having treatment? That means that they won’t be producing sperm anymore?
Is it something that men do? Should they be doing it?
[Dr Marie Wren]: No, I don’t think there’s ever been any suggestion that freezing your sperm because again, there’s going to be a loss of some sperm through the freezing thawing process. But given that most men have millions and millions of sperm anyway in a single ejaculate, I can’t see that there’s any benefit to freezing sperm to extend your fertility window when it’s still incredibly successful for men, provided they’ve got a younger enough partner.
And there are still huge numbers of older fathers who’ve got healthy children.
[Gillian McCallum]: So it shouldn’t put men off if they’re slightly older and it shouldn’t put women off having an older partner?
[Dr Marie Wren]: No, I mean, I think obviously it raises the social question of is it fair to the child to have a father that probably won’t even see them finish primary school, but because it’s possible, and because it’s possible through sex, provided an older man is having sex with a much younger woman.
Nobody ever talks about it, but I think from a social perspective, it’s nice for children to have at least healthy parents to see them to the next stage of their own life, ideally for children to have parents that will be fit enough and well enough to be grandparents, if possible.
The Morality of Older Parents
[Gillian McCallumn]: And that kind of ethical dilemma, is that one that you faced during your career? You don’t have to answer these questions if you don’t feel comfortable answering, but is that one that you would have faced if you’d had clients coming to you where you felt this person is?
[Dr Marie Wren]: I don’t think my job was to give people a realistic information about the chances of success. I don’t think it was my job ever to make a moral decision about whether or not somebody was too old. I think you have to talk to people about the chances of their treatment being successful and the processes that the parents have to go through, the risk of miscarriage, et cetera, et cetera. Whether or not you’re taking risks by putting back multiple embryos and the risks of multiple pregnancies, particularly perhaps in an older woman if she’s using donated eggs.
But I think to actually make a moral judgement about whether or not somebody was too old to be a parent isn’t I think it’s I think it’s a decision that society has to talk about.
But I’m not sure how we deal with that they say it takes a village to raise a child, and I think you can see that that’s true. And we don’t live in communities. I was lucky enough to have grandmothers that both had a big input in helping my parents raise up, and that’s, I think, a great benefit.
[Gillian McCallum]: I couldn’t agree more. And I think it’s a great benefit not just for the child, but also for the parent or the parents.
[Dr Marie Wren]: It’s a huge joy for the grandparents, but I think the later in life we have children, the less likely there will be grandparents there. But I think people can bring up children on their own without that help. But I think there are massive advantages to having an extended family. If you’re having your own child, whether that’s a biological family or a family of friends, I think it can work.
I think you can I think you can bring up a child with. if you have an extended support network of friends. Yeah, but it’s difficult and lonely job on your own, I think, entirely on your own.
The First Months Post Childbirth
[Gillian McCallum]: And that’s absolutely correct. And I’ve been so incredibly lucky. I’ve got two brilliant parents who have been so supportive of me and my daughter, and I also have a great network now where I am. But there’s so many women out there who are doing it on their own. There are obviously, of course, fathers out there who are doing it on their own, who don’t have the network of relatives.
And before you have a child, I certainly didn’t realise that it really is 24 hours a day. You kind of have this idea of this child, I’ll have this child. It’ll be great. I’ll have this child. But you don’t realise that certainly for a very long period.
First of all, she can’t even put them down. I mean, my daughter refused to be put down, so until she could crawl, she had to be held, carried, touched. She was just a very cuddly kind of touchy feely child. So this is 24 hours a day.
You’re taking your child into the bath with you, to the toilet with you. There’s no period where your lovely, wonderful child is placed down. And you just can’t comprehend that every hour of your day has to be accounted for. Who is caring for that child? If I’m working, if I’ve got phone calls, if I’ve got to be in an office, where will that child be?
And you don’t necessarily always want your child to be in 08:00 am to 07:00 pm daycare. Some people do choose that, but you don’t necessarily always want that. So you’ve got to factor in, well, when am I going to be there? And when are my parents going to be there?
And when can a friend be there? And so you end up kind of building a mosaic of care around the seven days that you have every week. And maybe I’m alone in that, but I could not have comprehended that for a second before my child popped out.
[Dr Marie Wren]: I absolutely agree with you.I think that it is difficult if you have achild that won’t settle, that won’t go in, a cock that has to be held and carried all the time. And I think it’s quite tough to leave your child to cry. I think having an experienced mother, my mother was a paediatrician,so she was an enormous help in telling me you don’t have to hold the child 24 hours a day. You can put them down and they can cry and they will be fine. But you feel incredibly anxious because so many people have so little contact with babies until they have their own first child.
I think historically when you grew up in a large extended family, you had younger cousins, you had younger siblings. A lot of people, I mean, I’ve certainly held babies as a young girl because I had younger cousins, we saw a lot of our cousins. But I think it’s scary for a lot of women, the first baby they ever hold is their own and you don’t really know what to do until trial and error.
It’s hard, isn’t it?
When the Paternal Clock Ticks
[Gillian McCallum]: It’s insanely tough and you definitely don’t know what to do. And it’s a huge learning curve, but it’s one that I definitely don’t regret and my daughter was hugely longed for. And I feel the same feelings that a lot of women feel in the years leading up to that, which was a life where I knew I couldn’t live my life without a child.
I’m also learning through, obviously the work that I do that men feel the same way too. And what I’ve learned through the various jobs and companies that I have that women tend, if women are going to want to have children, if that’s what they want to do, they’re going to really start feeling it in their kind of early to mid thirties.
And that’s just my experience. But what I also found is that men also get that same sense. If a man wants a child, it really starts kicking in but doesn’t start kicking in for another ten to 15 years. So the problem then is there’s this pool of men who come on, I’ve got to have this kid, I’m ready to go, this is the time. And of course there’s an age imbalance between when men really want to make it happen and when women really want to make it happen. And so if you’re not in an age gap relationship, it can cause some problems.
And if those men are single at that point in time, they’re looking for a partner who’s potentially much younger or looking for a surrogate. And I’m sure you must have experienced this in your did you was surrogacy something that you helped or aided with in your career or is that a different area?
[Dr Marie Wren]: A little bit, yes. I was involved in assisting couples that needed surrogacy and I think obviously it will become more commonplace, not just for helping women who’ve got uterine problems, but for assisting men to have children through surrogacy and egg donation. It is difficult, isn’t it?
I wonder if the two world wars made men very aware of their mortality and that where the men coming out of these world wars then keen to have children as soon as possible. And we now got a generation of men who don’t have that pressure, they haven’t faced their own mortality.
I don’t know.
It’s very difficult, but I think that certainly one see, I see that men don’t seem to grow up emotionally as quickly as women, so maybe it’s the emotional maturity that makes women realise that they want to have children now and that men come to that decision much later.
Why Women Delay Having Children
[Gillian McCallum]: That’s fascinating, and I never thought of it from the perspective of previous generations having this kind of pressure or perceiving there to be a pressure because they realise life is short, things can happen, I’ve got to get on with it now.
And I think you’re right in saying that society now because men know that they’re going to live till they’re 100 or if you’re in Silicon Valley till you’re 500, there isn’t that need to get ahead and have children. And one of the myths I always think it’s a myth about women’s infertility is that certainly if you read in the media, they always say, oh, it’s women put in their careers first and saying, oh, I’ll do it later. And when I speak to women and I know that you’ve spoken to thousands, if not tens, hundreds of thousands of women in your career, in my experience, it tends to be I haven’t met a person who was ready to have children.
I was ready, and I haven’t met someone who was equally as ready as me. And I don’t think it’s a position of being overly fussy or overly critical, although there is a small portion of women that will be I think it really is about trying to find a partner.
And again, we’re talking about heterosexual relationships here. A lot of what we’re doing is talking about heterosexual relationships. We’re trying to find a male partner and I and I think, as you say, emotional maturity can, I think, is potentially a factor in that and maybe just a feeling of there’s not a pressure, it can come later. But I do think there is kind of a biological kick in about ten to 15 years later.
That’s what I’ve been seeing anyway.
[Dr Marie Wren]: I think it’s complex, isn’t it? I agree with you. I don’t think that women delay having children because of their careers. I think it is sometimes difficult to have a career and to have a child at the same time. And I know that a lot of women fear that they will be passed over if they take time out to have children.
Until they’ve reached a certain position where they feel more secure, which obviously you can become a father and still get promoted, which is really difficult.
I also think that child care is expensive, difficult. People work longer. So how on earth do you factor in childcare if you’ve got getting to work early and staying at work late?
It’s all really difficult. Don’t know what the solution is. I think it’s a real challenge for women, particularly for women and one that I think some men, but not all men can see and appreciate.
So as you said, people flippantly saying oh, just go and freeze your eggs is kind of missing the point. Big companies that were offering women the opportunity to freeze their eggs should have also been offering women good childcare.
I mean, how many big companies have fantastic crushes that will make it possible for a woman to have a job and to have good child care included in the workplace?
The Egg Freezing Con
[Gillian McCallum]: You have hit the nail on the head. I believe that big companies offering egg freezing is the biggest corporate con of my generation. Women out there are being told about this incredible benefit of egg freezing. And I believe this is in the corporate world, we’re not talking about doing it for other reasons.
They’re being told we are doing this to support you. We’re doing this to support our females. I believe they’re doing it because they want to push off the time that women get pregnant so that they can keep them for longer, so they don’t have to deal with pregnancy complications.
They don’t have to deal with maternity leave they don’t have to worry about. Will they come back part time or full time or any of these horrendous things that large corporations think about?
I think it’s just designed to make women think they’ve got a safety net from their brilliant company. But the corporation is doing it so that their female staff won’t get pregnant.
[Dr Marie Wren]: I kind of agree with you, but I kind of think if they did it as a if it was a if it was a package that they had really good childcare and egg freezing, I’d say fantastic. You’re offering the opportunity for women who are single to freeze eggs, not for kind of our benefit, but for your benefit. But we’re also providing good child care for those women who’ve chosen to have children so that they can come back to work. Childcare has become so ridiculously expensive. I hear about through friends who’ve got children who are having children and they’re telling me that the child care is effectively going to wipe out an awful lot of women’s salaries. If you’re a teacher, if you’re a nurse, that what you’re going to pay for full time childcare is going to equate to what you would have earned from your job, which is ridiculous.
[Gillian McCallum]: So let’s put it out there to all of those big companies who are offering egg freezing the world’s foremost expert in fertility, dr. Marie Wren says to you, if you really want to support your staff with children, give them high quality child care, high quality crushes to enable them to come to work. Do a good job, but know that their child is taken care of. So you’ve heard it here from Dr Marie Wren. We’re putting it out there to all of those big corporations, this is what we expect you to do. Not just freezing these, actually taking care of what pops out at the end of it. Right?
Brenda’s True or False Quick Fire Round
I’ve got a couple of true or false, because we’re almost near the end. And I have my friend Brenda, who knows or knew that I was going to be chatting to you today.And I only have three true or false for you.
So, true or false: putting a positive pregnancy test under your pillow can summon the Stork?
[Dr Marie Wren]: False.
Gillian McCallum]: Darn it.
True or False: Repeatedly dancing the macarena during your fertile period can increase your chances of conception.
[Dr Marie Wren]: I’ve never heard that. But I am sure that people who are happy and relaxed are maybe having more sex. So maybe dancing makes you happy and relaxed.
[Gillian McCallum]: Perfect.
And finally, Brenda always likes to include a question that has the word socks in it. So true or false wearing lucky fertility socks with pictures of cute babies on also enhances your chances of getting pregnant.
[Dr Marie Wren]: I think that an awful lot of people, particularly those going through IVF, have Talismans, lucky eyes. And I just think that if you feel the need to have a talisman, use it. I just don’t think anything like that hurts, does it?
[Gillian McCallum]: Absolutely not. I love it. It’s brilliant. Get a talisman, grab a hold of it, have faith in it, have belief in it. Get Dr. Marie Wren out of retirement. Because we need her to keep giving us babies,
[Dr Marie Wren]: I think everybody needs to feel positive. So I think if you’ve got a lucky anything, it might not work. But it doesn’t hurt, does it?
[Gillian McCallum]: Definitely not.
The Wisdom of Dr. Marie Wren
And finally, do you have a piece of random life advice or any other type of advice that you’d like to share with people listening?
[Dr Marie Wren]: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I’d have to try and think of something that my mother would have said, because my mother was extremely wise. I remember her telling me that you get the children that you deserve if you’re lucky enough to have children.
But I think probably my piece of life advice is to be kind to yourself. I think sometimes we are too hard on ourselves. We feel that we set the bar high. We kind of set ourselves up to fail. So I think be kind to yourself.
[Gillian McCallum]: That’s perfect. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of time with me again. We met several years ago, and I was lucky enough to spend some quality time with you then. And you are such a gem. And I know why everyone loves you so much because I love you too. And thank you very much for spending this time with me and looking forward to seeing you soon.
[Dr Marie Wren]: Yeah. Gillian, it’s been lovely talking to you. Thank you so much.
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