If You're Planning to Have Kids in the Next 12 Months, Read This First

At 11:43pm the night before my 39th birthday, I was sitting on the edge of my bathtub, lurking in an online mom group.

The end of the post read: “Please drop your stories of getting pregnant naturally after 38 and everything went well.”

I ran to the comments so fast.

But once I was there, I switched to another app.

I guess I was scared to read the things I didn’t want to see.

Stories of failure, resorting to IVF, bad news at the ultrasound or the bloodwork.

I had been not-trying-not-preventing for several months now and was starting to worry.

I knew I should take it seriously, but I kept talking myself into one more chill month.

The chill month was a lie. I wasn’t being chill. I was lurking in a mom group.

Eventually I sucked it up and read the list.

Somebody got pregnant accidentally at 42.

Okay, okay. That's what I want to see.

Someone else had success after figuring out she’d been ovulating early.

Then someone who failed IVF twice and wiped out her savings.

Deep breath. Keep going.

Someone had two late term losses and is still trying.

Someone else mentions that this list is full of survivor’s bias.

That my self reassurance wasn’t based on anything and couldn’t actually predict my future success.

It’s so annoying when a stranger on the internet is right.

Nothing I read ever made me feel better. No one’s story calmed my nerves.

Because I was never scared about women in general.

I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to have a baby.

My future kid with one of the names currently living in my Notes app.

So instead of trying to talk myself into optimism again, which I already knew wouldn’t work, I decided to do the scariest thing possible.

Every study. Every randomized control trial.

I spent all my free time obsessing over this. I became extraordinarily annoying to talk to at social gatherings.

But like the type-A millennial woman I am, I got to the bottom of it.

Let’s start with one that had me screaming from my Instagram stories for weeks, shall we?

You know the deadline.

Every woman knows the boogeyman comes out at 35.

We say that age like it’s a given, but guess where it comes from?

That is not a joke.

I’m not making this shit up.

In 1986 Jane Menken published a paper called “Age and Infertility” in one of the largest scientific publications on the planet and using 300-year-old stats from women who lived before lightbulbs.

That paper has since been cited over 1100 times by other studies, meta analyses, and medical textbooks.

That’s how one study becomes an urban legend so strong even my doctor was quoting it.

The cutoff I was most afraid of comes from an era before antibiotics.

Okay, I thought. Maybe all of this is bullshit then.

I dug further.

I wanted it to be that.

But I came here for the whole truth, not one fact that would make me feel better, so I kept digging.

And I found something even better.

Turns out everyone’s fertility is going down.

1 in 6 couples can’t conceive.

That’s not one of the stats I was hoping to find.

But weirdly, it did make me feel a little better to know that fertility decline was happening across all ages, so it’s not like I missed some magic window.

Probably not the nicest thing to say, but it is what I was thinking.

Okay, I thought. How much of this is actually age?

After three full weekends of studies on PubMed, ChatGPT cross references, and endless Reddit comments, I stumbled onto this headline:

Fastest I’ve ever clicked on anything in my life.

I didn’t care if it was clickbait.

But it wasn’t.

These mice started ovulating more eggs, having more offspring, and the baby mice were healthy.

Then other studies retested and had the same success.

Another study, and another, and another.

This was blowing my mind.

I forced myself into bed finally around 3AM, so hyped that it still took me an hour to drift off.

I skipped work the next day.

Overcaffeinated, with four different drinks sitting beside my keyboard, I read:

I read it again. I took another sip of coffee.

So basically:

And what do you know?

All those factors that are the causes of the infertility crisis?

Each of these either causes or is caused by poor cellular health.

It sounds like bad news, but I was ecstatic.

This is basically just like those biological age vs real age things.

Not like a random biological clock that I just have to stare at as my anxiety climbs.

Control and I are friends.

We go way back.

So I scroll down to the densest part of each of the 42 clinical studies I have open on my laptop and start comparing methods.

Each of these studies improved cellular health by using specific nutrients that either:

If you improve these, egg health gets better.

Eggs take 90 days to develop before they ovulate, so if I did this right, in three months I could have an egg healthier than the ones I was producing a year ago.

Maybe even five years ago.

I started pouring through countless studies, acronyms, and dosing charts.

I was determined to figure out what worked, and how, and what I could use on myself.

Since sex ed in the 7th grade I believed my eggs were aging with me.

That I was born with all of them, and by the time I was 30 they would be running out.

But here’s what Mrs. Linley (and my future OB/GYNs) didn’t tell me:

For 90 days before ovulating, that egg is heavily impacted by everything going on in my body.

That egg development window is when researchers were giving patients these nutrients.

Specific vitamins, specific minerals, specific time frames.

So I did what any good Capricorn would do.

Then I took that list and compared it to the prenatal I had been taking.

It was a good one, not the $12 one from Costco.

I had bought it from a brand run by doctors.

I figured it would probably cover a lot of what had been proven to improve cellular health and I could buy whatever else I needed on Amazon.

Except it didn’t.

The doses were too small.

Many of the most important ones were missing altogether.

The forms were wrong.

They were using cheaper, less bioavailable forms at smaller doses or not at all.

I thought I was doing the most. I had given myself brownie points for being prepared in advance.

Back at my laptop, I started looking up other prenatals to see if I could find a better one.

I didn’t.

But I did find this study:

Turns out there isn’t a prenatal that follows the research.

I went into a bit of a rage.

How are they even allowed to sell these things?!

How would I have possibly known that?

What if I had gotten pregnant and something had happened because I wasn’t getting what I should have?

I quit my research project for a few days and spent my free time lifting heavy things to 2000s hip hop at the gym instead.

Every single supplement studied and proven to help.

I could turn one of my cabinets into a pharmacy.

I’d have to basically meal prep supplements, but I was ready to do it right.

Or, I felt all in until I spent 2 hours assembling all the right bottles in my cart and looked at the total.

$784.68

I made a weird, loud half-groan sound. My dog flinched.

I worked out the math.

Much less than the cost of a single unexpected infant health issue.

But I still couldn’t pull the trigger.

I left my cart there, full of a thousand different bottles I had already sorted into those giant pill organizers grandmas use.

I decided to most rational thing was to try to convince myself this wasn’t necessary.

I went searching for evidence that $780 a month of vitamins wouldn’t make a difference, just in case.

I eat healthy. I go to pilates. I drink green juice on a regular basis.

I might not need this.

I looked for evidence that could prove my other data wrong, and my searches all led me back to the same thing.

And it’s not an obesity problem, even though a lot of us have been taught that metabolism = weight.

It turns out, metabolism = cellular health.

Most people who consider themselves healthy, people who eat well and exercise, people who are a healthy weight and describe themselves as feeling good, still have metabolic dysfunction when tested.

I wanted to believe that I was in the 7% who were good, but am I?

What if I’m not?

Did it matter?

I decided the smart thing to do was cover my bases.

I was talking myself into the $780 per month Amazon cart when a positive pregnancy test popped up on my Instagram feed.

Some influencer had just found out she was expecting.

I almost scrolled past, not excited to see one more person getting what I wanted.

“Your prenatal can’t do this."

I kept reading.

“450mg of choline is critical for a healthy baby brain. Your prenatal contains 0mg.”

I was hooked. I hadn’t come across a real person talking about this anywhere.

The next line:

“600mg of CoQ10 is a game changer for egg quality. Your fertility vitamin contains 150mg of the wrong form.”

Suddenly this influencer was my new best friend.

I was cheering her positive test on.

I read some more.

“I’ve been a nutritionist for over a decade, and I read every ingredient label that goes in by body. That’s how I found Zona. I took it while I started trying to conceive to give my kid the best start.”

Did I strike gold while doomscrolling?

I had never run to the comments section of a post so fast.

I scrolled through dozens of congratulations until I found a few women saying they also swore by Zona.

Three seconds later I had a new tab open to the Zona home page.

Grabbing my laptop, I clicked over to my slightly insane looking nutrient spreadsheet so I could compare apples to apples.

The list goes on.

Zona had everything I had put in my Amazon cart plus a kick of magnesium and other minerals.

The doses were pre-packaged, separated out, and organized for bioavailability.

I let out a breath that I didn’t realize I was holding.

I could do this.

And it hit me.

I legitimately got a little teary, which is insane, I know.

But I’ve spent so much of my life carrying the weight of things for other people, and suddenly it felt like someone was carrying one for me.

I clicked checkout and slept better than I had in weeks.