They Lied To Us About Having It All, And It's Costing Us Our Children

I was in elementary school the first time I heard it. "Girls can do anything." The poster in my school hallway showed a little girl, fists on hips, staring down the world like it owed her something. "Girl power!" "The future is female." The messaging was everywhere—in my classroom, on merchandise, in the TV shows that told us we were destined for boardrooms, not bassinets.

Love and family? Those were for women who gave up. Who settled. Who betrayed the sisterhood.

I believed it. We all did.

I grew up in the nineties, came of age in the aughts, and hit my twenties during the golden age of the girl boss. Sheryl Sandberg told us to "lean in." Beyoncé sang about running the world. Every magazine cover, every TV show, every commencement speech hammered the same point: your career is your identity. Your womb can wait. Marriage is a trap. Babies are a detour.

So we did what we were told.

We climbed. We hustled. We put off dating "seriously" because who has time for that when there are careers to chase? We dated the wrong men because the right ones wanted families, and families, we were assured, could come later. After the corner office. After the book deal. After we'd become someone.

As I shared in my article last week for Evie, I was twenty-six when I fell in love with a divorced father of three. He was kind, steady, and clear: no more kids. I told myself it was fine. I didn't need to be a mother. I could be the cool stepmom. The career woman who chose differently. I could still be significant. I was very influenced by the modern feminist messaging.

Years passed. Perspectives changed. We realized we were in different life chapters and my fiancé was worried I'd resent him in the future for not giving me children of my own. The relationship ended. Now I'm in my thirties, single, and suddenly, terrifyingly aware that the future I'd dreamed of as a girl might not show up.

Last week the internet lost its mind over Brad Wilcox's piece in Compact. The sociologist laid out the data with the cold precision of a coroner: women who reach thirty without starting a family have roughly a fifty-two percent chance of ever having children. Not great odds. Not the odds we were sold.

Women who reach thirty without starting a family have roughly a fifty-two percent chance of ever having children.

The outrage was immediate. "How dare he?" "Misogyny!" "Stop telling women when to have babies!"

But here's the thing no one wants to say out loud: the people sounding the alarm aren't the villains. The villains are the ones who spent decades lying to us.

They lied when they said fertility is a light switch you can flip at thirty-five. They lied when they told us egg freezing was a reasonable Plan B instead of an expensive, low-success Hail Mary. They lied when they painted motherhood as the thing that would limit us instead of the thing that would give us purpose deeper than any title or expensive handbag.

France just did something radical. They're sending letters to every twenty-nine-year-old in the country, men and women, reminding them that biology doesn't negotiate. That the window is real. That "later" has a terrifying habit of becoming "never."

The French are being called fascists for it. I call it mercy, because I've seen what happens when we don't get the memo.

I have a friend who turned forty and decided to freeze her eggs "just in case." At the clinic, the nurse looked at her with something between pity and exhaustion. "Hunny, you should've done this years ago." My friend cried in the parking lot. She'd believed the magazines. The Instagram influencers. The celebrities who announced their first pregnancy at forty-two like it was no big deal. She thought she had time.

Another friend was one of the best editors in Hollywood. By thirty-five she'd won awards, had the big office, the assistant, the recognition. She also had the creeping realization that the life she actually wanted—a husband, kids, Sunday dinners—was slipping away. She started dating men she didn't even like, just to try to make it happen. At thirty-nine, her two-year relationship imploded. She called me in tears. "I put my career first because that's what we were supposed to do. Now yeah, I'm at the top of my game, but I've lost the only thing I actually wanted."

A third friend is in her thirties, married, and has been trying to get pregnant for two years. Every failed round, every negative test, every well-meaning "have you tried relaxing?" from people who don't understand. She said to me, voice cracking, "They lied to us. They told us it would be easy. Why did they lie?"

A generation of women were victims of the most successful propaganda campaign in modern history.

I hear versions of this story constantly. In DMs. In coffee shops. In the group chats where millennial women gather to compare notes on the lives we were promised versus the ones we're living. The successful ones who cry in their luxury apartments. The now-older ones who froze their eggs and have a slimmer shot at a live birth. The ones who say, "I don't regret my career, but I regret believing it was the only thing that mattered."

And here's the part that makes me uncomfortable to say: I'm in that camp too.

I may still get to be a mother one day. But I'm also a realist. The choices I made—the years I spent telling myself I didn't want children of my own, I'll just be the best stepmom, chasing the wrong kind of significance—might mean that prayer goes unanswered. And that grief is real. It's not theoretical. It's the empty nursery I walk past in my mind every single day.

For years I've spoken out against the female victimhood mentality. I still do. Believing you're doomed because you're a woman is the fastest way to become exactly what you say you are. But if we're going to talk about victims, let's be honest: a generation of women were victims of the most successful propaganda campaign in modern history. We are victims of "girl boss" feminism.

We were told that traditional womanhood was oppression. That wanting a husband and babies was basic. That prioritizing love over status was weak. That our bodies were inconveniences to be managed, not miracles to be celebrated.

And now we're shocked that so many of us are alone, childless, and devastated.

This isn't about shaming women who chose differently. Some women genuinely don't want children, and that's their business. Women having choice was the supposed goal of women's liberation after all. This is about the millions who did want them—who still do—and were never told the truth about what it would cost to wait.

The data is brutal. Fertility declines sharply after thirty. Miscarriage rates climb. The chance of abnormalities skyrockets. Yes, there are miracles. Yes, science can do incredible things. But miracles aren't a business model. And "you can have it all" was never a promise. It was a sales pitch.

Telling women the biological reality of their own bodies isn't misogyny.

I'm tired of watching my friends mourn the children they'll never hold. I'm tired of the gaslighting that says pointing this out is "anti-woman." Telling women the biological reality of their own bodies isn't misogyny. It's the opposite. It's love. It's the kind of love our mothers and grandmothers used to give before we decided feelings mattered more than facts and self, status, money, and power mattered more than nurturing others.

We owe the next generation better. We owe them the truth that career is wonderful but it will never love you back. That status is fleeting but loving your children is eternal. That the most significant thing most of us will ever do isn't closing a deal or becoming famous—it's raising human beings who know they are loved.

We owe them the warning we never got: the window is real. The clock is ticking. And no amount of girl-boss mantras can stop it.

If France can send letters, we can at least start telling the truth in our culture. In our schools. In our families. In the conversations with our younger sisters and nieces and the girls scrolling TikTok and Instagram thinking they have forever.

Because they don't. And neither did we.

It's not too late to change the story. But it is late. Later than we were ever told. And the women waking up in their thirties and forties with empty arms and full résumés deserve to hear, finally, what no one had the courage to say when it still could have made a difference: We were manipulated and lied to.

And the cost could be our children.