It's time the media and sex education told the truth about women's fertility.

Motherhood at 40: 

how women came to believe a modern myth

by Miriam Zoll

In a recent PBS “To the Contrary” show about the infertility industry, host Bonnie Erbe` asked: Why did Miriam Zoll wait until age 40 to try to become a mother? Here is my response.

Over the last four decades, we emancipated daughters of America have been taught that we have the power to control our destinies. Programs like the Ms. Foundation for Women’s original “Take Our Daughters To Work Day,” which I helped co-produce, reinforced the notion that we could grow up to be just about anything­­––from astronauts to doctors, to lawyers or plumbers. With abortion and contraceptives legally accessible, we believed from an early age that we could control our reproduction, too. If the Pill could help us prevent unwanted pregnancy, surely we could just as easily manifest a wanted pregnancy whenever we were ready. If we encountered obstacles, well, there was always reproductive medicine like in-vitro fertilization (I.V.F.) to save the day.

When it came to motherhood, from the late 1990s onward, rumors like “40 is the new 30” began to spread like wildfire among a small demographic subset of mostly educated, middle class women. With the media and cultural discourse fortifying the myth that modern women’s reproductive systems were now, somehow, superhuman, millions of women assumed it was safe to wait. Over glasses of red wine, we celebrated the timing of our good fortune, recognizing that unlike the women who came before us, we were not bound by our reproductive biology.

This is the backdrop that literally pushed the ‘old’ notion that women’s (and men’s) fertility declines in their 30s off the proverbial table, and paved the way for the current, confusing discourse on the subject.

The modern cultural dialogue brazenly defies—or misinterprets––volumes of contemporary medical evidence confirming that, on average, ovarian reserve sharply drops after 37.5 years. (1) A case in point is a well-publicized June 2013 article in the Atlantic magazine, written by psychologist Jean Twenge and titled: “How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby?” Twenge, who birthed her own children after age 35, asserts, “Women's age and fertility...is one of the more spectacular examples of the mainstream media's failure to correctly report on and interpret scientific research."


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