To be sure, egg freezing is not an ideal choice. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, which has the highest European age at first birth (at nearly 30), almost a third of women with college degrees remained childless at the end of their childbearing years, according to one study. In America, 43% of corporate professional women between the ages of 33 and 46 are childless. Data show that this “fertility penalty” for highly educated, professional women is real. Many of my female colleagues who wanted children were not able to have them. My children, who are teenagers now, are the truest joy of my life. Against the odds, I had my second child a year later, a daughter, Justine, without IVF assistance. At age 39, still hoping to have a second child, I was warned by an Egyptian IVF colleague to “yallah”– get going – before it was too late. At age 37, I finally delivered my first living child, a son named Carl. In the midst of my demanding job as a tenure-track professor, I became pregnant naturally, but then had to take medical leave for a rare pregnancy complication, which ended in the stillbirth of twin daughters. My dual desires to establish myself in my career and to become a mother were literally colliding. Those years between age 35 and 40 were difficult ones for me. Given that my own research focused on infertility and IVF, I knew a woman’s fertility declines rapidly at age 35 and becomes negligible by age 40. But, at age 35, I felt that my chances to have children were rapidly slipping away. I realized that the time was not exactly right to have children. I had already waited for two years after marriage before going off oral contraception. Sign up for CNN Opinion’s new newsletter.Īt the same time, I wanted to have children.
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