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| - A female fetus has approximately 6 million to 7 million oocytes — immature eggs — at 4 months old, but the number drops dramatically, to about 1 million to 2 million, by birth and continues to fall throughout the woman's life.
Over the years, people have repeatedly shared a quote from drummer and author Layne Redmond about the development of women's eggs. The quote, taken from her book "When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm," reads as follows:
All the eggs a woman will every carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old foetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb, and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.
One Facebook post from May 2024 sharing the quote went viral, receiving more than 25,000 reactions and 13,000 shares, as of this writing.
Posts on social media have often interpreted this quote to mean that our grandmothers produced us in their wombs. For example, a TikTok video shared in February 2021 posited that "your mom didn't make your eggs. Your grandmother did," suggesting that because baby girls are born with eggs in their ovaries, a grandmother is responsible for the creation of the eggs that become her grandchildren.
However, the process is more complex. A female fetus develops her maximum supply of eggs while still inside her mother's womb, forming the basis for the idea that we started as eggs in our mothers' ovaries while they were in our grandmothers' wombs. But this doesn't mean that our grandmothers produced us in the direct sense.
According to the University of Leeds, British epidemiologist David Barker explained in the early 1990s (as part of his Barker hypothesis) that all the eggs a woman will ever develop and carry in her ovaries form while she is a 4-month-old fetus.
Between 17 and 20 weeks of gestation, the uterus and vagina of a female fetus start to form. The fetus has approximately 6 million to 7 million oocytes (immature eggs) in her ovaries (this number decreases to about 1 million to 2 million by the time she is born). These oocytes continue to diminish in number over a woman's life, with around 300,000 to 500,000 remaining at puberty. Throughout the woman's reproductive years, only about 300 to 400 oocytes mature and are released during ovulation.
So, it's true that our grandmothers carried our mothers, who — still in the womb — carried the eggs that became us. (Fetuses inherit a unique blend of both their parents' DNA, so it's inaccurate to say that an egg that becomes a person was solely created by that person's grandmother.)
Snopes has previously written about reproduction, including findings of declining global sperm counts.
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