In 2001, Hewlett’s book hit me like a punch in my unpregnant gut. Her argument hit exactly on the facts of my own situation and intensified my anxiety about my romantic and biological clocks. I was even questioning where I might have gone wrong in my choices. Suddenly I felt bad about all my career ambition and the emotional and financial independence that I had achieved. It was as if I should start listening to another, older, cultural message; a learned desperation because I was not in the proper, socially sanctioned place a woman of my age should be.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett did, after all, have some real facts on her side: it is true that as a woman ages, her egg quality does decline and pregnancy becomes both riskier and harder to achieve. Older eggs do have a higher chance of contributing to genetic abnormalities and early miscarriages. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine reports that while a thirty year-old woman has a 1 in 385 chance of having a baby with a chromosomal abnormality, that chance has risen to 1 in 192 by the time she is 35. By the time she reaches forty, she has a one in 66 chance. It is also true that women have a harder time getting pregnant as they get older. A 2004 study published in the journal Human Reproduction, finds that 75 percent of women who start trying to conceive naturally at age thirty will succeed in a year. At age thirty-five, about 66 percent will conceive in a year, and 44 percent at age 40.

But Hewlett also missed some really important facts. Medically speaking, the dangers of a having a child after age thirty –five have become significantly reduced by developments such as non-invasive genetic screening and diagnostic pregnancy tests. And while Hewlett’s statistics of the likelihood of getting pregnant at various life stages are correct, they are only statistics. In fact, every woman had her own distinct biology, and the variations between women are massive. In her 2005 book Everything Conceivable: How Reproductive Technology is Changing Men, Women and The World, Washington Post Journalist Liza Mundy eloquently describes the reality of this blurring line: “After thirty-five, women enter a period of extreme variability. A woman may remain fertile for ten years or she may undergo a precipitous drop in her ability to conceive; her childbearing may be over. As a rough gauge, doctors assume that infertility usually sets in ten years before menopause, which begins, on average, at age fifty-one.”

Hewlett left out another important point as well: an increasing amount of evidence shows that aging affects men’s biological clocks as well. Today men make up more than half of the cases of infertility. Sperm does not decline in quality in such a drastic way as eggs, but scientific evidence does point to the fact that sperm does age. In a 2006 study of the Israeli military database of men, researchers studied men to determine whether there was a correlation between paternal age and the incidence of autism and related disorders. They found that children of men who became a father at 40 or older were 5.75 times as likely to have autism disorder as those whose fathers younger than 30. So it is quite likely that as the age of marriage and child bearing rises both for men and women across America, poor sperm quality rather than poor egg quality will often be the culprit causing problems for many couples. But where are all the cover stories on that?

Hewlett’s book, and the media onslaught that followed it, seem to have reflected a nostalgia for an earlier, simpler age, when men were men and women stayed home to take care of their children. And once upon a time, that division of labor made sense. In the agricultural age, women conceived younger and many more children because children were economic assets as workers on the farm. In the post-industrial age, children are emotional assets but economic liabilities, costing both a middle class husband and wife and a single parent over $10,000 a year. More often than not, the male head of household cannot support that family on his own. Women need to build their careers in order to become their own economic assets and to support their families. (Many women, of course, have also found that they really like working.) Women have therefore put earning power before procreative power. We are getting married and having children after we get our master’s degrees and the corner office.

The age of first-time motherhood—and fatherhood—is rising all over the developing world, especially in urban centers among the middle and upper middle class. Just in America, the number the number of women becoming pregnant between the ages of 35 and 44 has nearly doubled in the US since 1980. In 2003, the number of women over 40 who gave birth in a single year topped 100,000 for the first time.

The shape of human life has changed dramatically in the last 100 years throughout the industrialized world. It’s not just that women are waiting longer to have children. People are also living much longer—nearly twice as long they were as 100 years ago. The various stages of our lives—childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and beyond—are all extending, and sometimes we’re shifting the sequence as well. Technology and feminism have made it possible for women to make choices they couldn’t have made even a generation ago. Many women are getting pregnant before they get engaged or walk down the aisle. Some women are even having children as “Single Mothers By Choice” before finding husbands, or freezing their own eggs to donate to themselves further down the road. Amidst the flurry of stories about “Baby Panic,” I read an article about a 58-year-old British woman who had given birth to twins conceived from donated embryos!

The effect of Hewlett’s book, and the “baby panic” furor that followed, was to make women feel women more constrained by biology at a time when they should be feeling less constrained than ever. Women have a range of choices unprecedented in human history.

Intellectually, I knew this. But emotionally, I was just as panicked as everyone else.

I am now thirty-eight years old and I’m still hoping to start a family of my own. I didn’t arrive here by accident. I’m here because of choices—both good and bad—that I have made along the way.