The major exception to the rule: smoking. A cigarette habit will do a number on just about every major health system—your heart, your lungs, even your skin—including your reproductive system. Smoking kicks egg loss into overdrive—women who smoke enter menopause an average of one to four years earlier than non-smokers. (The verdict on vaping is still out: “The problem with vaping is that everyone thinks it’s not as bad as cigarettes but we don’t really know what it does yet,” says Dr. Knopman.)

Weight can also impact your chances of having a baby (that goes for male partners too). “Obesity in women increases the rate of miscarriage, and is associated with worse outcomes for fertility treatments,” Dr. Brady says.

Success rates with IVF—often hailed as a magic bullet—hover around 5 percent for women in their early 40s. “People are really shocked to hear that,” Dr. Brady says.

Really shocked. Fertility doctors see women every day who’ve been led to believe that egg-freezing and IVF are insurance policies with limited risks and hopeful guarantees.

IVF is revolutionary science that has allowed over 8 million births to women who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to get pregnant, since the procedure was first pioneered in the 1980s. But “most of the success of IVF is based on the age of the female,” Dr. Knopman says. “The younger you are when you make the embryos the better chance those embryos are going to be viable and lead to a viable pregnancy.”

It’s far from a fail-safe promise, but the technology (and the ad campaigns surrounding it) has given an inflated sense of confidence about what fertility treatments can and can’t do. “People come in at 40 and say, ‘Oh I’m going to do IVF,’ and I tell them okay but this may take us a lot of rounds and it may not work,” Dr. Knopman says. In other words, you can’t just throw money at the problem: “It’s not always a slam dunk,” she says.

It also matters where you do your IVF. It’s a technically challenging procedure, part art, part science, and not all IVF clinics are up to the challenge. “Not all labs can do egg retrieval and storage the same way,” Dr. Knopman says. “Lab conditions can alter the embryo.” Before handing over your credit card, your body, or your dreams of future pregnancy, ask the clinic the right questions: How many eggs have you frozen? How many eggs have survived the thaw? How many eggs have made embryos?

Look for a clinic associated with the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology, which provides oversight and keeps tabs on a clinic’s success rate.

“One of the biggest myths I hear is that the pill hurts your fertility and that long-term pill use is not good,” says Dr. Knopman. That’s not true. Let us repeat: Hormonal birth control—whether you use the pill, the ring, the patch or a hormonal IUD—doesn’t hurt your fertility.

“What birth control won’t protect you from is egg loss,” Dr. Knopman says. “Most of us are born with about one to two million eggs. By the time we get our first period, most of us have about 350,000 eggs—you lose a significant amount before you even menstruate.” Each month, regardless of whether you’re ovulating or not, around a thousand eggs die off, their cells absorbed back into your body. “From the first period to the last period, you’re constantly losing eggs no matter what you do,” says Dr. Knopman.

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