Millions of women are being told when to get pregnant based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics or fertility treatment. What’s the reality? Are women being oversold outdated facts? When is the deadline to have a safe pregnancy?

Time to Conceive Principal Investigator, Dr. Anne Steiner, interviewed by John Hockenberry on NPR’s The Takeaway

Deep anxiety about the ability to have children later in life plagues many women. But the decline in fertility over the course of a woman’s 30s has been oversold. Here’s what the statistics really tell us—and what they don’t.

Home fertility tests may not be reliable predictors of a woman’s ability to get pregnant, researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill have found.

New research indicates that home fertility tests can’t be relied upon. A quarter of women were labeled infertile by the tests, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, although in actuality they had no more trouble getting pregnant than other study participants.

There’s some new research out that is raising questions about those home fertility tests that are being sold in drug stores. A new study found that the tests may incorrectly label women infertile even though they are still capable of having babies.

The study found that the cutoffs used by such infertility tests, which measure levels of a molecule called follicle stimulating hormone or FSH, label many women as infertile who actually go on to have children naturally. It also suggests that another hormone, called antimullerian hormone or AMH, could prove to be a much better harbinger of infertility.