article_snippet.sent: During my pre-broody years I’d been bombarded with images of 40-something celebrities, gloating about how easy it had been for images of 40-something celebrities to conceive naturally and quickly.
article_snippet.sent: Of course, horror stories in the tabloids tried to persuade me that I had about as much chance of procreating successfully after the age of 30 as I did of making it to The X Factor finals, but I had decided to follow the stars and wear blinkers.
article_snippet.sent: The truth, I was quickly discovering, lay somewhere in the middle of the heartbreak, guilt and misinformation women find women drowning in as women consider motherhood.
article_snippet.sent: Friends were as divided as the media when it came to declaring Friends true fertility stories.
article_snippet.sent: While one friend admits to leaving it too late and worrying one friend to sleep each night over the mounting IVF treatment bills (one friend husband has insisted, scared of debt, one friend stop with the baby dream when they hit the £50,000 mark); another friend is determined to put off pregnancy until one friend has passed some professional exams.
article_snippet.sent: and if I have to re-sit, I can delay pregnancy another year easily,’ one friend tells me, perhaps naively.
article_snippet.sent: Another friend got joyously pregnant with one friend first child on the eve of one friend 40th birthday.
article_snippet.sent: ’ Other friends in their mid-to-late 30s are choosing to stick Other friends in their mid-to-late 30s heads in the sand.
article_snippet.sent: If I get to 40 and I’m still single, I’ll get just find a sperm donor,’ is the flippant battle cry of many women I know.
article_snippet.sent: Some friends get pregnant as soon as Some friends decide to start trying, of course, and those ones frustrate me the most.
highlights_snippet.sent: Journalist Sarah Ivens, 39, tells of her struggle to get pregnant aged 34 .
  
highlights_snippet.sent: The mother-of-two tried for years before having a child .
  