facts that a teenage gal is not likely to hear at home, but have been reverberated here often: time is not on your side.
Most women aren’t taught — and don’t learn — basic facts about fertility and aging, says Finn, author of the e-book “The Baby Chase.” Instead, celeb moms the likes of Salma Hayek (a baby girl at 41), Marcia Cross (twins at 44) and Mariah Carey (twins at 41) make being an older mom look easy — and glamorous.
“It’s not that we’re stupid,” she says. “It’s that we’ve been misinformed.”
As proof, she points to a new survey conducted on behalf of RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association, and presented at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine’s recent annual meeting.
The poll of 1,000 women ages 25 to 35 who had talked to doctors about fertility found that participants could correctly answer seven out of 10 basic questions less than half the time. The Fertility IQ 2011 Survey found that women were wrong most often about how long it takes to get pregnant — and about how much fertility declines at various ages.
“We were not at all surprised,” says Barbara Collura, executive director of RESOLVE. “This is what we experience every day.”
Most women simply don’t realize that at 30, a healthy woman has about a 20 percent chance of conceiving and by the time she reaches 40, her odds drop to about 5 percent per month, Collura said.
Again, this bears repeating:
(1) No one is suggesting that women should necessarily forego education or careers;
(2) No one here is affixing blame on women for their predicaments.
All I am saying is parents need to be sober with their children and give them the information that they may use to make wise decisions.
If you aspire to marry and have children, it is better to think of this sooner rather than later. Your biological time clock begins ticking early, but–once you hit age 28–you’re in the 2-minute warning.
If you go to college, the key is choosing a path that allows flexibility: whatever you do, do it with little or no debt. If you choose a professional path–law, medicine==there are costs you need to consider. I’m not saying don’t do it; I’m just saying count the cost.
