In our age in which people are marrying later and delaying having children, many women find themselves in the painful situation of feeling that their reproductive years are slipping away from them without having the children they want to have. Part of the problem is that how many reproductive years a woman has is uncertain. It varies from woman to woman.

Now a new method offers the possibility of assessing how many years a woman has before her “biological clock” runs out.

The method involves measuring the size of the ovaries by ultrasound (they shrink as a woman approaches menopause).

The method does not work on women who are on the Pill, which prematurely shrinks the ovaries.

Unfortunately, if the method works, it will be used to push some women toward using illicit reproductive techniques, but for other women it will have the opposite effect. Those with more (rather than fewer) reproductive years will know that it is still worth trying to conceive naturally, and even those women who are committed to using moral means to conceive but have fewer reproductive years left will know to try to conceive sooner and more earnesly.