As Carl Djerassi, the father of the contraceptive pill, noted in an essay in The New York Review of Books, by the age of thirty-five a woman’s stock of eggs is 95 percent exhausted and those that remain are more liable to produce faults or surprises, like multiple births. Once women pass thirty, they are much more likely to have twins. The one certainty of procreation is that the older both parties get, the more difficulty they are likely to have conceiving, and the more problems they may encounter if they do conceive.
