Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • If I wanna have kids, I have to do it by the time that I turn 35.

  • Ah, yes, 35,

  • the age when the media tells us a woman's fertility rate supposedly plummets.

  • You've gotta get pretty serious about having kids before 35.

  • You're getting older and you know that clock is ticking.

  • By the time we're 35, fertility has decreased by 50%.

  • Aghhhh!

  • See! I gotta get baking now before this oven breaks down!

  • I mean, they have done studies...

  • Sure, but where those study got their data from is real weird.

  • Was it from a large well-conducted sample of modern women?

  • Nope! It came from world French census records from the 1600s.

  • (coughs)

  • No mud. No plague.

  • This must be heaven!

  • Seriously, I have been getting fertility advice from a bunch of 400-year-old French farmers?

  • Unfortunately, yes!

  • Oh Emily, this is Jean Twenge, the author of "The Impatient Women's Guide to Getting Pregnant"

  • and the researcher who discovered the truth about this data.

  • You know when I wanted to have kids in my late thirties,

  • I was as freaked out about these studies as anyone,

  • but I'm a researcher, so I looked into it. I found out nobody really noticed that these claims were based on such old data.

  • And that's a problem!

  • Because that means they come from a time before fertility treatment, antibiotics or modern medicine.

  • Yeah, there could have been a lot of reasons that these women weren't getting pregnant after 35.

  • Maybe their husbands had gone to war, maybe they had diseases, or—I don't knowmaybe they just stopped having sex.

  • Umm... Yeah, I have a headache.

  • The truth is, in modern data (an) average woman, age 27, who's healthy,

  • has an 86% chance of getting pregnant within a year,

  • and that same woman at age 37, her chances are 82%.

  • It's like, barely a difference.

  • You know, if you don't have fertility problems already,

  • you could have a baby later than you think.

  • Age doesn't really affect fertility that much until you're in your forties.

  • Take it from me. I had three kids:

  • one at 35, another at 38 and then at 40.

  • Woo, congratulations!

  • Honestly, it was no sweat.

  • Okay farmers, let's get you back to the past where you belong.

  • Thanks, Jean.

  • But I read that by the age of 40, your chances of birth defects double.

  • (Screams)

  • You know, the hen house maybe working, but the eggs are going sour!

  • Not quite, miscarriages do become more common,

  • but your chances of having a baby with a birth defect only double from 0.5% to 1%.

  • That's like nothing.

  • Yeah, exactly! But if they say it doubles, it sounds way scarier, and sells more magazines.

  • All this fear mongering has caused a generation of women to panic that they're going infertile in their thirties.

  • And if you seen this show before, you know what happens when people get scared, Corporate America swoops in to take advantage.

  • Egg freezing industry.

  • Ice (nice) to meet you.

  • Egg freezing began as a way for women to save their eggs before undergoing chemotherapy,

  • but today it's grown into a vanity industry that preys on fertility fear.

  • Your eggs are rottingfast,

  • so we're gonna freeze some now and thaw them out later when you're ready to have a baby.

  • What she failed to mention is that each of those eggs only has a 2-12% chance of resulting in a baby

  • and the whole shebang is gonna cost you upwards of 20,000 dollars.

  • 20 grand?

  • Yeah, and all that money is usually wasted.

  • The vast majority of women who freeze their eggs never actually use them,

  • because, again, you can get pregnant in life later than you think!

  • You scammer!

  • Oh oh snow (no) !

  • That was awesome!

  • The truth is Emily, if you're in good health, through your early forties, you don't really need to stress that much about fertility.

  • I've been planning my whole life around the idea that we have to have a baby soon.

  • Well, you don't. If you're not ready to have a kid now, that's okay. You got time.

  • Man! I feel so much better.

  • You know what, why rush this? We should just wait to get...

  • PREGNANT?

  • Ah, we're gonna be parents!

  • Hey, Adam here!

  • If you liked that, be sure to watch all new episodes of Adam Ruins Everything every Tuesday at 10, on TruTV.

If I wanna have kids, I have to do it by the time that I turn 35.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it