6. Don’t assume it’s the woman’s fault.
Yes, in general women have fewer viable reproductive years than men do — it’s the reason women are plagued by terms like“biological clock” but men can father children at 92. Doctors liked to tell us about women’s “old eggs” and show us charts where female fertility plunged at age 32 like an Olympic diver coated in Crisco.
But in 40 percent of infertile couples, the man is either the problem or part of the problem. And in many, many instances (one doctor told Silvija it was about a third of his cases), experts can’t find a specific cause at all — which is what happened to both John and his wife and Silvija and her husband. Reproductive medicine is a relatively new science, after all, but we were still astounded by how little doctors could tell us, test after test and procedure after procedure.
