I think what would move the needle is if women believed we lived in a society that cared about our self-actualization.

If we believe that we could be mothers and follow our dreams, be mothers and have the careers we wanted, be mothers and have the support systems and policies that would help us care for our children.

Hey everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today on Her Money. I'm Gene Chatsky. And today's topic is personal. It's also more than a little bit complicated.

We're talking about motherhood and specifically one woman's journey from deciding to be child-free and marrying someone who had made the same choice to changing her mind in her mid-30s to eventually choosing to go with a donor egg at age 41 in her second marriage.

Today, for the first time in U.S. history, women over 40 are having more babies than teenagers are,

which is certainly something to celebrate.

But we also know that there can be a cost to waiting.

If you want to freeze your eggs,

it's around $5,000 just for retrieval. A single round of IVF in vitro fertilization can run $12,000 to $30,000. And IVF using your own eggs isn't the only option. There are other roots, too. The entire process of having a baby using donor eggs, that can cost around $47,000. And I could go on, but I won't, because my guest knows all of this intimately.

Ruthie Ackerman is the author of The Mother Code, my story of love, loss, and the myths that

shape us.

She's someone who's asked herself the hard questions about motherhood and she's inviting the

rest of us to do the same.

Ruthie, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me, Jean. Thank you so much for having me, Jean.

Thank you so much for being here.

You open the book with a raw, honest question.

You ask, did I really want a child, or did I just not know what to do with myself if I didn't

have one? Let's start there. I think that is a big

question for many of us. Why are more women talking openly about it right now? I think you hit the

nail on the head when you said that we are having more conversation. Social media is connecting us. We're feeling less alone.

I think that when I was thinking about these decisions, even 10 years ago, I felt like I was all

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