Should women be worried about their fertility as they enter their 30s? Maybe, maybe not.
Dr. Jean Twenge published a story in the Atlantic last week telling women that they might have more time than they think when it comes to having children. This week, Twenge and Director of Reproductive Surgery at NYU, Dr. Nicole Noyes, joined Abby Huntsman on HuffPost Live to discuss whether women should panic about their ticking biological clocks.
Dr. Twenge pointed out that a commonly-cited statistic -- that, after age 35, one in three women will have trouble falling pregnant within a year -- is based on information from the early 1700s. "Recent studies are much more encouraging," she claimed. "They do show a decline in fertility during a woman's late 30s, but it's not as steep."
Twenger herself had three children after she was 35 years old, and spoke about how her experience had been affected by fear:
I read all these statistics that were very frightening... suggesting that if you waited until your late thirties to get pregnant that you were going to have a lot of trouble. And every single time I was worried, even though I was very fortunate and conceived all three of my children naturally within a few months, I still felt that anxiety.
Dr. Noyes, however, was skeptical about whether women should be so laissez-faire when it comes to family planning. She cited studies from the 1950s that indicated "for sure that women are less fertile, starting probably around the age of 28, with the most significant drop between 35 and 40," and added:
Thirty percent of women age 40 will not be able to conceive, even with assisted reproduction, and you don't know if you're going to be in that 30 percent. I think it's quite dangerous for a woman to think that she can wait until 40 or near 40 to have her children.
Watch the clip above to see what else the experts had to say, and check out the full HuffPost Live segment here.
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