When Anna De Souza was in her early 30s, she asked her ob-gyn when she should start thinking about having kids. “When you were 26,” she remembers the doctor saying.

She was surprised. She’d had some sense that fertility decreases with age but didn’t know how significant the drop-off was. No doctor had ever told her, and she certainly didn’t learn about it in school. She took sex ed at her New Jersey high school in the late 1990s, but she said it focused mostly on trying to scare students out of having sex. She remembers little about the class besides watching a graphic VHS video of a woman giving birth.

De Souza, a journalist in Philadelphia, now wishes that class had included the basics of fertility and reproduction. A more robust sex-ed program, she thinks, could have prompted her to c

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