The panic stemmed from the April 2002 publication of Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s headline-grabbing book, Creating a Life, which counseled that women should have their children while they’re young or risk having none at all. Within corporate America, 42 percent of the professional women interviewed by Hewlett had no children at age 40, and most said they deeply regretted it. Just as you plan for a corner office, Hewlett advised her readers, you should plan for grandchildren.

The previous fall, an ad campaign sponsored by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) had warned, “Advancing age decreases your ability to have children.” One ad was illustrated with a baby bottle shaped like an hourglass that was—just to make the point glaringly obvious—running out of milk. Female fertility, the group announced, begins to decline at 27. “Should you have your baby now?” asked Newsweek in response.

For me, that was no longer a viable option.

I had always wanted children. Even when I was busy with my postdoctoral research, I volunteered to babysit a friend’s preschooler. I frequently passed the time in airports by chatting up frazzled mothers and babbling toddlers—a 2-year-old, quite to my surprise, once crawled into my lap. At a wedding I attended in my late 20s, I played with the groom’s preschool-age nephews, often on the floor, during the entire rehearsal and most of the reception. (“Do you fart?” one of them asked me in an overly loud voice during the rehearsal. “Everyone does,” I replied solemnly, as his grandfather laughed quietly in the next pew.)

But, suddenly single at 30, I seemed destined to remain childless until at least my mid-30s, and perhaps always. Flying to a friend’s wedding in May 2002, I finally forced myself to read the Time article. It upset me so much that I began doubting my divorce for the first time. “And God, what if I want to have two?,” I wrote in my journal as the cold plane sped over the Rockies. “First at 35, and if you wait until the kid is 2 to try, more than likely you have the second at 38 or 39. If at all.” To reassure myself about the divorce, I wrote, “Nothing I did would have changed the situation.” I underlined that.

I was lucky: within a few years, I married again, and this time the match was much better. But my new husband and I seemed to face frightening odds against having children. Most books and Web sites I read said that one in three women ages 35 to 39 would not get pregnant within a year of starting to try. The first page of the ASRM’s 2003 guide for patients noted that women in their late 30s had a 30 percent chance of remaining childless altogether. The guide also included statistics that I’d seen repeated in many other places: a woman’s chance of pregnancy was 20 percent each month at age 30, dwindling to 5 percent by age 40.