Go to Health podcast: How late can you leave it to get pregnant?

How has modern medicine changed the odds of getting pregnant? Photo / file

In this summer podcast series, each week the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB's Go to Health podcast will look at a different health issue. Today, it's what the science says about modern pregnancy. Hosted by Frances Cook.

We all know the pain of trying to get accurate health information online.

A quick Google can mean a headache is diagnosed as a brain aneurysm, or an aching hip becomes bone cancer.

But one area that seems to get more than its fair share of misinformation is pregnancy.

How long should you try to get pregnant the regular way before calling in the professionals? How much can modern medicine help you? And, most importantly, at what age will your ovaries wither and turn to dust?

There's so much pressure around having babies, often directed at telling women to hurry up and get on with it before they're over the hill.

The last thing I want to do is add to that pressure. Ladies, we have enough on our plates.

But I do still want to find out what's fact, and what's fiction, so we're at least making an informed choice.

So in the interests of calming down the discussion and bringing some facts back into it, let's bring in the experts working at the cutting edge.

I talked to Guy Gudex, director of fertility clinic ReproMed, for the latest Go to Health podcast.

We talked about what the average window of fertility is for a modern woman, how medical science can help, and what the limits are of that.

For the interview, listen to the podcast.

If you have a question about this podcast, or an idea for the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here Instagram here and Twitter here.

Don't forget to subscribe to Go to Health on the Apple podcasts app, or I Heart Radio, to make sure you never miss an episode.