In this day and age, we have an over abundance of information about everything. Yet, we seem to be pretty misinformed about our reproductive powers and limitations.
I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that our knowledge about how we get pregnant is limited, and worse, that we tend to be over optimistic about our chances of natural and aided conception. What I wasn’t sure about if it was just me. I never did like biology or anything to do with human anatomy in school. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention? As I talked to friends and colleagues, however, I realized it wasn’t just me. I have lots of very smart friends, smarter than me, who also over estimated their reproductive prowess.
I blame our reproductive ignorance on three factors: 1) our very one-sided sex education which leads us to believe that sex will most likely lead to pregnancy, which isn’t the case at any age 2) the over abundance of older, celebrity moms in media and 3) we don’t pay attention to things that aren’t relevant to us, and these days, getting pregnant, more often than not, isn’t relevant to us until we’re in our thirties, at which point, we face a rude awakening.
This has just been a hypothesis of mine. After all, the sample size was just me and a handful of friends who all lead similar lifestyles: educated, goal oriented, career gals who live in New York City. Perhaps others, elsewhere were better informed?
But it turns out, people who are much smarter than I am, people who specialize in this kind of thing, have studied this phenomenon and found that we are, indeed, repdroductvily illiterate, or at least, misinformed.
So ladies, I’m here to say, it’s ok. Check this study out, and this abstract out – you’ll feel a lot less silly for not knowing – it seems few women do! In short, these studies have shown that women from all demographics don’t know the facts and grossly underestimate the difficulties that age brings to having babies.
This is just another reason to urge doctors to have more honest conversations with us, much earlier – especially now that we have some options.
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