Celeb moms like Salma Hayek, Mariah Carey, Kelly Preston, and Halle Berry make pregnancy after 40 look easy and glamorous. In reality, getting pregnant in your 30s and 40s can be challenging and downright frustrating. It can be nearly impossible to get pregnant using your own eggs in your 40s, but you wouldn’t know that if you relied on popular culture for your fertility education.
According to a new fertility awareness survey sponsored by EMD Serono, Inc., a bio-pharmaceutical firm, in conjunction with RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, most women are ignorant when it comes to the question, “When is a woman most fertile?”
The poll of 1,000 women (between 25 and 35) found that women could only answer 7 out of 10 basic fertility questions fewer than 50 percent of the time. The questions they got wrong most often how long does it take to get pregnant?, when is a woman most fertile, and when am I most fertile? Women also didn’t understand how much their fertility declines with age.
Many women in the Fertility IQ 2011 Survey thought that a 30-year-old woman had a 70 percent chance of conceiving each month. In reality, she only has a 20 percent chance. Survey participants also believed that a 40-year-old woman’s chance of pregnancy was 60 percent, when truthfully, she only has a 5 percent chance.