The age of fertility

Illustration by Moira Gilligan

I wrote a story for Harper’s Bazaar about the push to educate younger women about their fertility. If that sounds dull, it shouldn’t. Fertility is a thorny topic that touches on hot-button issues about women and their bodies. The push to make women more aware of their fertility is also tied up with a push toward egg freezing, IVF, and other assisted reproductive technologies that are alternately helping us extend childbearing years and deeply complicating them. I honestly don’t know what I think about all this, but it was fascinating to learn more, and try to locate the moral center of such a fast-moving target. Women’s relationship to their own bodies — specifically around the topics of motherhood and sexuality — is the subject of my next memoir, which I sold to The Dial Press/Random House in July. Exciting news, though I still have to write the thing, which won’t come out until spring 2020 at the earliest. This is the first piece in what I suspect will be many looking at the complexities of choice.