Notes

- what the press reported about the fertility of women in 30-35

an ad campaign sponsored by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) had warned,“Advancing age decreases your ability to have children.”
Female fertility, the group announced, begins to decline at 27. “Should you have your baby now?” asked Newsweek in response.
The first page of the ASRM’s 2003 guide for patients noted that women in their late 30s had a 30 percent chance of remaining childless altogether. The guide also included statistics that I’d seen repeated in many other places: a woman’s chance of pregnancy was 20 percent each month at age 30, dwindling to 5 percent by age 40.

- why might the press get the science wrong

Studies asking couples how long it took them to conceive or how long they have been trying to get pregnant are as unreliable as human memory

- what's the actuality
Thus, “the observed lower fertility rates among older women presumably overestimate the effect of biological aging,” says Dr. Allen Wilcox, who leads the Reproductive EpidemiologyGroup at the National Institute of Environmental HealthSciences. “If we’re overestimating the biological decline of fertility with age, this will only be good news to women who have been most fastidious in their birth-control use, and may be more fertile at older ages, on average, than our data would lead them to expect.”