The paucity of human ova. Seriously.

I was doing some light reading for my thesis on pain and I came across this charming quote about the evolution of traits and their biological function:

"A proper [biological] function of the swimming mechanism in a human sperm", says Milikan (1986), "is to get the sperm to an ovum. But only a minute proportion of these mechanisms actually perform this function - because of the paucity of human ova."

PARDON?

Paucity of human ova???? Not, "Reproduction as a method is so crazily inefficient that we need millions of swimming critters just to reach one egg." No, rather, there is a paucity of eggs.

If there were truly a paucity of ova, then every single egg rotting in my ovaries would have been utilised by the screaming baby-hungry hoards by now. There would be laws about it.

I can't believe that was written in the 80's.