When the head of an all-female Cambridge college last week revealed a plan to teach students about fertility, she said it felt 'perfectly, obviously right and a good idea'.
'We have swung too far one way,' said Dorothy Byrne, President of Murray Edwards College. 'We are teaching about consent, we are teaching about harassment, but we are not teaching them the facts about their own fertility.'
Ms Byrne knows the dangers of delaying motherhood. The former head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4 had her daughter via sperm donor at the age of 44.
It's unlikely, then, that she was expecting the criticism which came her way.
Accusations that she was 'unfeminist' and comments that it was 'not OK' to ask a woman when she would have a baby, came mostly from young, millennial women.
When the head of an all-female Cambridge college last week revealed a plan to teach students about fertility, she said it felt 'perfectly, obviously right and a good idea'. 'We have swung too far one way,' said Dorothy Byrne (above), President of Murray Edwards College
But I totally agree with Dorothy Byrne. It matters not a jot whether it offends people to state that a woman's fertility steadily declines as she gets older. It's a simple fact.
It's not that fertility drops off a cliff on your 35th birthday but it's beyond doubt that the odds become more firmly stacked against you with every year that passes.
These things matter and it matters, too, that women – and men – are free to discuss them openly.
By the age of 37, the two million eggs a woman is born with will have dwindled to 25,000. Of these, the quality won't be anywhere as good as 20-year-old eggs.
In some parts of the Health Service, pregnant women over 35 are clinically classified as 'geriatric' due to the additional risks to mother and child.
It's not that fertility drops off a cliff on your 35th birthday but it's beyond doubt that the odds become more firmly stacked against you with every year that passes. These things matter and it matters, too, that women – and men – are free to discuss them openly. (Posed by model)
It's also the reason that egg donor clinics won't accept donations from women over 35.
Everyone is different, of course. Some women may happily hypnobirth their fifth child at 43 while others will struggle to conceive their first at 25. The problem is you just don't know which camp you're in until you start trying.
I know very well what it feels like to have your fertility drop away after the age of 35. I'm 40 and had the first of my two children at 33. Our son was born a few days before our first wedding anniversary.
What was the fuss about? All those scare stories were designed to control women, to get them to breed and ignore their careers. Pah!
Our second child, however, was a different story. By then, I was over 35 and things were trickier.
After three miscarriages, I went to see Professor Lesley Regan at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington. She dealt in cold, hard facts. Blood tests. Scans. She conducted a careful
