It’s completely unrealistic.” Women of 45 or 46 regularly come into his clinic thinking they can have IVF with their own eggs, unaware of how unlikely that is to work. Dr Richard Paulson, of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, calls the celebrity cult of silence around their fertility a “form of misinformation”. It is a cultural curiosity that everybody turns into Penfold when a woman over 40 has a baby, particularly twins. IVF is taken as read, unless (whisper it), it is one of those womb’s-last-hurrah moments, spontaneously shooting out two eggs to maximise its chances. Yet the really powerful disseminators of misinformation are not 240 actors, or even 2,400 of them, but the fertility industry itself.

Source: The Guardian October 30, 2017 15:22 UTC