A new study published in F&S Reports and reported by Jaclyn Anglis in The Reproductive Times puts a hard number on something many embryology and clinical teams already feel in the exam room: younger patients are not, in fact, better informed about fertility than the generations before them.
The survey of 212 U.S. women aged 18–27 found that fertility knowledge improved only 3% compared to Millennials surveyed in 2017, despite a decade of social media, wellness content, and fertility-tracking apps in between. Only 29% correctly identified IVF success rates at age 35, and just 27% could estimate miscarriage risk accurately, a figure that was actually worse than the Millennial baseline from 2017. While 87% knew roughly when fertility peaks, only 54% could identify when it starts declining. Silent conditions such as reduced ovarian reserve, endometriosis, and PCOS remain widely misunderstood, and as Dr. Sonia Gayete-Lafuente (CHR) notes in the piece, the sex education most Gen Z patients received was "mostly related to contraception," leaving fertility and ovarian aging largely unaddressed. She argues fertility counseling needs to move earlier,into routine gynecology visits, with AMH testing done "every year or every two years" as standard preventative screening.
Why this matters operationally, not just educationally
For clinics,this isn't an abstract public-health finding, it's a counseling-load problem. If a new patient's baseline understanding of their own risk profile is this inconsistent, first consultations end up doing double duty: education and clinical decision-making, usually in the same 20-minute slot. In practice, that means clinical decisions, like protocol, dosing,and timing, get made, while patient education is the part that gets cut short or pushed to a follow-up call.
Counseling on your own numbers, and getting the time back for education
The study's core problem is that patients are calibrating expectations against vague, generalized figures, or no numbers at all. Through our integration with FertilAI, clinics running MedITEX can generate treatment and medication insights (dosing, trigger timing and ovulation timing for IUI/FET cycles)in seconds. A physician still reviews and approves every recommendation before it reaches the patient, but the clinical groundwork that normally eats into the appointment is already done when the patient walks in.
That's the real shift: instead of spending consultation time assembling a plan from scratch, physicians start from insights already grounded in real world outcome data, freeing up time for the conversation the study says patients actually need. "Only 29% know the real success rate at 35" no longer has to be a rushed aside at the end of a consultation, it can become the starting point of an actual explanation, with time to walk the patient through what it means for them specifically.
What this means if the gap doesn't close
The risk isn't hypothetical. Patients who leave a first consultation with expectations still miscalibrated, because the appointment ran out of time before the education could happen, are more likely to be blindsided by a cycle outcome, more likely to disengage or drop out of treatment when reality doesn't match what they understood going in, and more likely to come back with the same questions at every subsequent visit, adding load right back onto nursing and physician time. As data-driven counseling becomes the norm rather than the exception, clinics still running purely manual, from-scratch consultations aren'tjust working harder for the same result– they're the ones patients notice when they compare their experience to a clinic down the road that got it right the first time.
Source: Jaclyn Anglis, "Gen Z Women Have Profound Gaps in Fertility Knowledge," The Reproductive Times, August 31, 2026, citing research by Meredith L. Clements, PhD, published in F&S Reports.
