10 things I wish I'd known about fertility at 30

Content warning: Frank talk around infertility, miscarriage and pregnancy loss below. If you’re feeling anxious or sensitive about fertility at the moment, this post may not be helpful for you just now.

One of the many strange facets of being a woman is how little most of us think about the prospect of having babies before we get anywhere actually near doing it. Women in particular tend to hear a lot of opinions (many of them unsolicited) about “getting around to it” of course ‒ but rarely do we delve into the science, process or mechanics before babymaking is actually on the table. It’s a bit like kids being taught the recorder and how to use a protractor at school, but not how to do our taxes. Important stuff essentially buried by formal education. As a result, people who want kids tend to end up in two teams: the super-keen, thinking constantly about how to mould their life plan around parenthood, and those who think “I’m nowhere near ready - I’ll just shelve it until I’m in a situation where I want to do it.”

I was in that latter camp until very recently. In some ways, it seemed like ignorant bliss: why would I worry about fertility for a single minute until I had to? But as I’m finding out at the grand old age of 36, it can be empowering and informative to know a bit more about how it all works in the years before you’re actively hoping to conceive. We only have a certain amount of fertile years: why would we wait until the latter half of them to find out what it all involves?

In 2021 the average age for people giving birth in England was 31 years old – the oldest since records began in 1938. That means more people than ever are having to contend with the (frankly unhelpful) bogeyman that is fertility “falling off a cliff” after the age of 35. I wasn’t planning to be over 35 by the time I was thinking about kids, but that’s the way the cards fell. I met the person I want to have children with at 34 and, within the same year, had unrelated surgery to remove fibroids from my uterus. My surgeon told me not to leave it too long if I wanted to try and get pregnant. I felt awkward explaining to him the perfectly logical justification that I’d only met the person I’d be committing to raising a child with - that I’d be binding myself to until death with this joint endeavour - a few months earlier.