If you’re a woman who wants to have kids someday (but not right now), you’ll more than likely have a growing distaste for the word ‘fertility’. The older you get, the more it starts popping up everywhere, from targeted Google ads to your mum’s friend Karen. Hit your late 20s, and the subject of just how equipped and ready your womb is to carry a child becomes a matter of public discussion – whether you like it or not.The trouble is that all the information out there regarding fertility is so confusing. Karen’s regurgitating the same fertility advice she heard from doctors back in 1978 and now, the internet: a web of communication that was meant to give us the power of knowledge but has allowed half truths and rumours about our health to flourish.A recent study by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists found confusing fertility advice is “sparking unnecessary worry among UK women” with 86% saying that they find all the information from different sources contradictory. Forty-nine percent have worried about their own fertility and a quarter of 18-24-year-olds are concerned. In fact, two in five younger women have considered freezing their eggs in the future.
So if you’re not quite at the point where you want to have kids, should you be worrying about your fertility now? Or are you free to think about something else?
Ahead, we rounded up some of the unsolicited things young women at Refinery29 and beyond have been told about their fertility and which have bothered them over the years. To put their minds at rest, we asked the experts just how much of what they’d heard was true, and how much of it could be taken with a pinch of salt.
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