The Abiding "Fertility Myth"
By Gina Maranto, Biopolitical Times guest contributor
| 11. 09. 2011
Since at least the mid-1990s, the popular press in the developed world has been spreading the word that women’s ability to get pregnant declines with age. I wrote an Atlantic Magazine cover article on the implications of delayed childbearing in 1995, and the biological facts haven’t exactly changed over the ensuing 16 years.
It’s true that IVF success rates among older women have increased due to
the use of donor eggs. Too, egg freezing has become more viable due to
the advent of the high-speed cooling process known as vitrification [PDF]. That technique has led to a whole mini-industry in egg banking, a.k.a. elective oocyte cryopreservation, but success rates continue to be quite low [PDF, registration required], so the procedure doesn’t significantly alter the situation despite claims to the contrary. One recent meta-analysis suggested that those women who have opted to freeze their eggs might have done so too late to make a real difference.
So I was surprised to discover, checking up on recent literature, that unrealistic views about women’s fertility continue to be quite common among college...
Related Articles
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
MEXICO CITY — When she walked into an IVF clinic in June, Alin Quintana knew it would be the last time she would try to conceive a child. She had prepared herself spiritually and mentally for the visit: She had traveled to a nearby...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...
