Edit: Why is this relevant to the MRM? Well, I can only offer my own interpretation. Women like Janet Bloomfield have often said that when they spoke of their desire to have children and settle down at a young age, other women (specifically feminists) would tell them they were "crazy" for not pursuing a career first. The implication was that they would be "shackled" to a patriarch with no source of independent income. The further implication is that men have some sort of desire to control women via their wombs. "Barefoot and pregnant" etc.

NOW is a feminist organization, so it isn't surprising they would take such an approach; they don't explicitly state that their fear of educating women about fertility is rooted in fear of the "patriarchal" family construct; rather they claim that they don't want to hurt women's feelings. This seems like an odd justification for so important an issue. As women get older they are at much higher risk for miscarriage and a slew of birth defects. IMO, this is another example of feminists placing political ideology before what is best for both men AND women.

"Back in 2001, the ASRM devoted a six-figure sum to a fertility awareness campaign, whose goal was to show the effects of age, obesity, smoking and sexually transmitted diseases on fertility. Surprisingly, the US National Organization for Women (NOW) came out against it. ‘Certainly women are well aware of the so-called biological clock. And I don’t think that we need any more pressure to have kids,’ said Kim Gandy, then president of NOW. In a 2002 op-ed in USA Today, she wrote that NOW ‘commended’ doctors for ‘attempting’ to educate women about their health, but thought they were going about it the wrong way by making women feel ‘anxious about their bodies and guilty about their choices’.

Although the ASRM denies the backlash is connected, its spokesman Sean Tipton says the organisation has not done a fertility awareness campaign since.

In the end, lack of fertility education on the medical side and the unwillingness to explore it on the patient side seems to come down to the fear of offending women.

Naomi R Cahn, author of Test Tube Families (2009), argues that ‘the politics of reproductive technology are deeply intertwined with the politics of reproduction’ but ‘although the reproductive rights issue has a long feminist genealogy, infertility does not’. Discussion of infertility is threatening to feminists on two levels, she contends: ‘First, it reinforces the importance of motherhood in women’s lives, and second, the spectre of infertility reinforces the difficulty of women’s “having it all”.’

Many studies show that women are not only woefully ignorant when it comes to fertility, conception and the efficacy of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) – but they overestimate their knowledge about the subject. For instance, a 2011 study in Fertility and Sterility surveyed 3,345 childless women in Canada between the ages of 20 and 50; despite the fact that the women initially assessed their own fertility knowledge as high, the researchers found only half of them answered six of the 16 questions correctly. 72.9 per cent of women thought that: ‘For women over 30, overall health and fitness level is a better indicator of fertility than age.’ (False.) And 90.9 per cent felt that: ‘Prior to menopause, assisted reproductive technologies (such as IVF) can help most women to have a baby using their own eggs.’ (Also false.) Many falsely believed that by not smoking and not being obese they could improve their fertility, rather than the fact that those factors simply negatively affect fertility.

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-do-women-know-so-little-about-their-own-fertility/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AeonMagazineEssays+%28Aeon+Magazine+Essays%29