The studies about women's fertility dropping after age 35 are very very flawed. They've been proven to be poor evidence of fertilities links to age based on century old data.
Also not having a child isn't the worst thing for everyone. Some people are quite happy childless.
Some interesting bits of insight into it:
Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University in the US, was 34, recently remarried, and looking to start a family, when she heard it from her doctor.
"That was very frightening to me, as it is to many women who are in their 30s," she says.
Confronted with those odds, she wanted to find out where the statistic had come from. And she discovered something quite amazing.
"The data on which that statistic is based is from 1700s France. They put together all these church birth records and then came up with these statistics about how likely it was [someone would] get pregnant after certain ages."
These are women who had no access to modern healthcare, nutrition or even electricity. Why would any researcher think they can tell us something useful about modern-day fertility?
The most widely cited is a paper by David Dunson published in 2004, which found that 82% of women aged between 35 and 39 fell pregnant within a year. That's significantly better than the two-thirds chance drawn from the 300-year-old birth records.
But can we be confident it's more accurate?
Yes, says David James, of the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) fertility guideline development group.
"It was a single study undertaken relatively recently of about 780 women, in seven different European centres. The important point about that was that these were women who were trying to conceive," he says, adding that it is "much more realistic".
The main problem with the historic data, in James's view, is that the women may not have been trying to conceive.
Indeed, they may have been actively trying to avoid becoming pregnant. They may not even have had intercourse.
"There's no doubt that intercourse becomes less frequent the older the couple are," James says. And in the 1700s, people aged more quickly than today.
Another finding of the Dunson study was that, while fertility declines with age, it does not appear to do so as quickly as we have been led to believe.
Among women aged 27-34, the study showed that 86% will have conceived within a year of trying. So the 82% figure for women aged 35 to 39 is only a little lower.