Infertility affects one in eight couples in the general population and one in four female physicians. Many are unaware of these statistics, even in the medical community. When faced with infertility, there is an enormous emotional, physical, and even financial toll. While there is not a lot of data available on infertility in female physicians, a survey of 600 female physicians published in 2016 showed that 53.3% said they would have attempted to conceive earlier and 16.7% said they would have used cryopreservation to preserve their fertility if they had known the statistics of infertility. Meera Kirpekar, MD, Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative Care, and Pain Medicine at NYU Langone, shared her personal experience with this important topic and her goal of change for the better in workplaces for female anesthesiologists.
Medical school, residency programs, and fellowship training take years and are extremely high stress. In...
