What most women don't know about fertility

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Have you ever found yourself talking to a friend about your fertility struggle, when a blank, horrified look begins to crawl across her face? She's probably blissfully ignorant about all a person can go through to conceive. Except for those of us who've been forced to learn firsthand about things like stimming, egg retrieval, male factor infertility, and reproductive endocrinology, these terms may as well be Greek to most people. For a "fertile", the concept of getting pregnant is usually something to the effect of get frisky;sperm meets egg; buy home pregnancy test; have baby.

But a new study out of the UK suggests that this ignorance may not be all that blissful, after all. According to Medical News Today, two out of three British women between the ages of 25-40 "don't know there is only a small window of opportunity (two 'peak' fertile days) in which they can conceive each month...which could be costing some women months or in worst cases years of unnecessary frustration, because they could be trying to conceive at the wrong time." 

Okay, stop laughing. I know that for most of you reading this article, pinpointing the exact moment your egg drops each month is as intuitive as getting dressed each morning, but let's think about this for a minute.

There is a lot of poor information out there - before you discovered your infertility, did you have any inkling of just how hard it might be to get pregnant? I don't know about you, but I spent many years trying NOT to see that little blue plus sign. All my knowledge was focused on NOT getting pregnant. Maybe if we were made more aware of our fertility earlier on, some of us would've been spared some pain and frustration?

Fertility Education: The Actual Sex Ed

The Medical News Today article interviews a 37-year-old television presenter, who laments, "It came as a complete shock to be told that at thirty-eight my fertility had been rated at 0.75 where 0 is deemed infertile. After much discussion and further testing, my age was coined as the single contributing factor. I'm an educated intelligent woman, but this was complete news to me - had I been better informed fertility in general I would have never left it this long. I now live with the reality I may never have children."

It's hard not to scoff at this comment, isn't it? But the reality is that we see older women having babies all the time, especially here in Los Angeles. But that's probably because this town is full of career-driven, successful older women who put off having kids and have the money and resources to invest in IVF. As well they should - trust me, I'm in no way implying that we are at fault for out biological clocks. 

I just wonder if we're missing the boat on this one, though. No one really talks about age as a fertility factor, probably because we're all afraid of insulting our feminist sensibilities. But mother nature is a cruel beeyotch, and maybe we do need to be better informed in our early twenties so we can be better prepared to face the fertility monster in our thirties and beyond.

For example, what if they taught us this in high school?

Our Own "Examiner Guide to Fertility"

So...let's do an informal poll. Write to me at sbarston@gmail.com or just comment below, and tell me what you wish you were told about fertility. What should sex ed teach us about getting pregnant rather than avoiding pregnancy? I'll publish the list in a week or so. Let's help these poor uneducated Brits, shall we?