"She was surprised. She'd had some sense that fertility decreases with age but didn't know how significant the drop-off was. No doctor had ever told her, and she certainly didn't learn about it in school. She took sex ed at her New Jersey high school in the late 1990s, but she said it focused mostly on trying to scare students out of having sex. She remembers little about the class besides watching a graphic VHS video of a woman giving birth."
"A more robust sex-ed program, she thinks, could have prompted her to check her egg count or freeze her eggs when she was younger, or even try to have kids sooner. She ended up having twins at 36, after two rounds of IVF, and later a son, also through IVF. But if she'd known more about fertility earlier in her life, she might have tried for a family "the good, old-fashioned, fun way," she said, "instead of the needles way.""
Anna De Souza learned in her early 30s from an ob-gyn that fertility declines significantly earlier than she expected. Her high school sex ed in the late 1990s emphasized scare tactics and birth footage rather than reproductive biology or fertility basics. Better sex education that covers both pregnancy prevention and fertility preservation could encourage actions like checking egg counts, considering egg freezing, or attempting childbearing earlier. Many patients arrive at fertility clinics with misconceptions about reproductive biology. Reproductive specialists report widespread misinformation as people increasingly delay starting families.
Read at The Atlantic
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