How much do women know about common fertility issues? Perhaps not as much as you might think.
In a recent survey sponsored by biopharmaceutical firm EMD Serono Inc., with investigators from RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association, more than 50 percent of the 1,000 women questioned failed to correctly answer at least seven out of 10 basic fertility questions.
The questions that stumped many of them had to do with infertility as it relates to age and how long it may take to get pregnant at ages 20, 30, and 40. That’s not surprising, given the boon of health and beauty products that purport to keep a woman looking and feeling young as she ages. The problem is, there’s no magic anti-aging tonic for a woman’s reproductive system, which does continue to decline with time, making it considerably harder for a woman to conceive at 40 than at 20.
Researchers found that women think they can easily conceive into their late 30s and early 40s because celebrities make it look so easy. What they don’t realize, however, is that celebrities often call on fertility treatments, including in-vitro fertilization, donor eggs and surrogacy, to increase their chances of having a baby later in life.