It's a summer evening in New York City. I'm 25 years old, backpack slung over my shoulder, sitting in a large room in a fancy hotel. There are 100 or so fashionably dressed women around me, most in their 30s and early 40s, eating popcorn and drinking champagne. Suddenly, a fertility（肥沃） doctor chirped from the stage. Ladies, you are young and fertile（肥沃的） and fabulous（ 难以置信的）. This was a so-called egg-freezing cocktail（鸡尾酒） party, and it felt like a scene from Sex in the City.
We were there to listen to a handful（一把） of doctors talk about something most of us knew very little about, our eggs. I was there that night as a journalist, but I was also there for personal reasons. Most women have two ovaries. I only have one. When I was 12, I had an emergency surgery（外科） that removed my right ovary and fallopian tube. Nearly a decade later, for unrelated reasons, I almost lost my left ovary and my ability to ever have biological（生物的） children, the one future non-negotiable（可通过谈判解决的） on my life's to-do list.
Doctors urged（推进） me to freeze my eggs. The stakes（树桩） were high. I had to make a decision, but to do that, I needed to understand this wild world of reproductive（生殖的） technologies. Well, understanding turned into obsession（迷住）, and I ended up writing a book about the quest（寻求） to control fertility（肥沃）. I spent eight years talking with reproductive endocrinologists, start-up founders（铸工）, embryologists, CEOs. I interviewed more than 100 women struggling（ 努力） to make important decisions about their fertility（肥沃）.
I visited world-famous clinics（ 诊所） and peered（凝视） into petri dishes inside laboratories. I researched hormones（荷尔蒙） until my brain hurt. And what I discovered blew my mind. There's so much about our bodies we don't learn（学习） about in school or talk about with our doctors. Most of us had meager（贫乏的） sex said that can be summed（概括） up by that line in the movie Mean Girls when Coach Carr said, "Don't have sex because you will get pregnant（怀孕的） and die." One minute or 16 fumbling with condoms and trying to avoid pregnancy（怀孕） at all costs.
And then suddenly, we're 35 in our gynecologist office, our most fertile years behind us, being labeled as advanced maternal（母亲的） age and learning（学习） about egg quality and fertile（肥沃的） windows for the first time. So we grow up under the illusion（幻觉） that everything's fine. Until it's not. Maybe you or your partner have had a miscarriage（[妇产] 流产）, an abortion（ 流产）, a terrible experience with birth control. Maybe you have PCOS or endometriosis. Maybe you've never said the word vulva out loud.
We learn about our fertility when we're close to no longer having it. One woman I interviewed, mid-30s with an Ivy League（同盟） master（主人）'s degree, thought that women had a dozen（一打） or so eggs. Total. In fact, a woman is born with 1 to 2 million eggs in her ovaries and as she gets older, she starts running out of functioning ones. So even the smartest among us still find（找到） ourselves thrown back into no man's land of not knowing enough. Study after study shows many women aren't aware that female fertility declined（拒绝） sharply（严厉地） after their mid-30s.
Meanwhile, more women than ever are getting pregnant or attempting（尝试） to later in life. We postpone（延迟） motherhood for all kinds of reasons, educational, financial, professional, personal. But the reality is our brains want to delay（推迟）. Our bodies do not. How do we make the body do what the brain wants?