Aggregated News
Many young women were understandably seduced by the once widely publicized message that if they chose to delay pregnancy and were then unable to conceive, they could still have babies through in vitro fertilization, also known as I.V.F.
Miriam Zoll was one of them. Married at age 35, she thought she had plenty of time to start a family. After all, she said, “My mother had me at 40, and since 1978, the fertility industry has been celebrating its ability to help women have children at older ages.”
When at 39 she and her husband decided to start a family, they discovered that nature refused to cooperate. Four emotionally and physically exhausting I.V.F. cycles (and two attempted donor egg cycles) later, they remained childless.
“What the industry didn’t say is that the success rate for older women is consistently low,” she said. “It focused on the 20 percent of women who succeed, not the 80 percent failure rate. The industry avoided saying that the technology hasn’t worked for an estimated 20 million women globally during the last 40 years.”
Women...