"[In 2002], Sylvia Hewlett published a book called Creating A Life , which talked about the fact that many women of her generation who pursued their careers faced fertility problems; and that if you didn’t have a baby by the time you were 35, your fertility fell off a cliff and you were in trouble. It sent this shiver through the media and crated this buzz phrase in those years, 'baby panic.' All these women that had invested all these years in their education and their career, which is now par for the course, were like 'God, did I forget to have a baby? Did I do something wrong?'"I was one of those women. I was nearing the age of 35 and I was single and I had not yet had a child...and then I started looking at all these statistics and realized that I was just one among many many women — millions — having children later, because we are putting our economic power ahead of our procreative power. I felt that women really needed a new road map, something that didn’t cause baby panic but instead turned that panic into peace.""I ended up getting my eggs frozen, which is an increasingly common choice for women especially now that the American Society for Reproductive Medicine has taken the experimental label off of egg freezing [which it did in 2012]. I dated for a couple years, still not wanting to put so much pressure on myself to find my 'baby daddy' — I really wanted to find true love. Ultimately, in those three years, I didn’t find the love of my life. I decided to put the cart before the horse, get pregnant on my own through artificial insemination with a sperm donor, and have a baby as a single mom by choice — or what I now call a 'DIY mom.'""It’s a scary leap to have a baby, whether you’re single or married. It really changes everything. Making that choice as a single woman, I had a lot of fears and anxieties that I would be lonely, that it would be really hard economically. But it’s turned out to be really quite the opposite: It’s really opened up new opportunities, new relationships in my life that I never would have thought would happen. You have to be a strong person to have a child on your own, but anybody who feels that they are gutsy and can take risks, I would highly, highly recommend it if you’re in a situation in your life where you might want to. I figure I have the rest of my life to find love, but I didn’t have the rest of my life to have a biological child."