I had my kids at 35, 37, 39, and 44 — all conceived naturally. When I walked into my oldest child’s kindergarten class, I wasn’t the only forty‑year‑old mother, and no one thought twice about it. In Manhattan, plenty of women pour their twenties and early thirties into careers and start families later than the national average. It never felt unusual because it was the norm around me. What you don’t see in an elementary school are the women who waited too long and discovered they couldn’t get pregnant when they finally wanted to.
New York could help change that with a simple, affordable fix. The choices around when and how to become a mother have expanded dramatically, and our laws haven’t kept pace. My grandmother had no access to birth control, IVF, or a doctor who understood postpartum depression. Young women today take all three for granted. But that doesn’t mean modern motherhood is easy — or that women focused on building careers fully understand how fertility works.
Look at the cultural noise: Anne Hathaway was mocked online for being pregnant at 43. Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez was dragged for freezing her eggs at 37. The disturbing debate around Lindsay Clancy’s child-killing case has even led some to question whether postpartum depression is real. IVF and surrogacy have helped countless families, yet critics often ignore the people whose children exist only because those options did.
Meanwhile, there are men becoming fathers in their sixties and seventies whom the culture mostly shrugs at, or even chuckles about. Yet women’s choices are endlessly policed and criticized — especially now that we have so many more choices.
Let’s be honest about what’s new and what isn’t. Effective birth control, higher education, and the ability to delay or skip marriage while supporting yourself — those are new. Older motherhood is not. The average age at first birth has risen from 21.4 in 1970 to 27.5 today, and New York has long been above that. Women have always had children from their teens through their forties because our bodies can. Childbearing has never been confined to a narrow window.
But seeing so many women have children later — often with medical help — lulls younger women into thinking they have endless time. The truth is simple: it’s much easier to get pregnant at 25 than at 35 or 40. I wish I’d started earlier and had the chance for more children, and I now understand how lucky I was to have four after 35 — something I never thought about in my twenties.
Many women struggling with infertility in their thirties and forties spent years getting pap smears and birth‑control refills without ever hearing how sharply fertility declines with age. One IVF doctor recently argued that his booming practice is partly a monument to that silence — routine visits that cover cancer screenings and contraception but never explain a woman’s fertility timeline. His proposed fix is almost absurdly modest: a short, insurance‑covered fertility conversation built into routine care, like a cholesterol screening. It’s cheap, humane, and shouldn’t be partisan. Every woman deserves to hear the truth about her body before her fertility — not her lack of information — makes the decision for her.
New York legislators could make that conversation standard. Most women are never told how dramatically their chances of becoming a parent drop in their thirties. I was fortunate. The surge in fertility‑treatment use shows how many women weren’t.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned, New York lawmakers rushed to protect abortion access. Where is that same urgency for the other half of reproductive freedom — knowing enough about your own fertility to plan around it?
New York already requires insurers to cover contraception and mandates fertility‑treatment coverage once infertility is diagnosed. But the state says nothing about covering the cost of a conversation that might help a woman avoid that diagnosis altogether.
Governor Hochul, her running mate Adrienne Adams, and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins are, between them, mothers and grandmothers. They know what it means to start and raise a family. A bill already pending in Albany, sponsored by State Senator Michelle Hinchey, would expand fertility preservation coverage; a modest add-on requiring insurers to cover a basic fertility-counseling visit, the way they already cover a mammogram or a contraceptive prescription, would cost the state nothing and could change the trajectory of thousands of women’s lives. It is more cost-effective for women, and their insurance companies, to get pregnant before needing fertility treatment!
Helping young women understand the truth about fertility and allowing them to plan for motherhood, fully armed with facts they need, is a vital part of reproductive freedom and New York lawmakers can and should make that happen