(The Atlantic) – Interest in fertility treatments is down—even if the actual procedures are booming.

So I was particularly struck by a couple of statistics from this year’s “Singles in America” study, an annual survey of roughly 5,000 people conducted by the Kinsey Institute, in partnership with the dating company Match: From 2017 to this year, the share of respondents who said they would be willing to consider IVF fell by more than half, from 44 to 18 percent. Openness to egg freezing dropped from 33 to 17 percent. Those are steep declines, especially in a time when more people are choosing to become single parents, celebrities have shared their own IVF or egg-freezing stories, and use among the general public keeps increasing. (Singles’ interest in adoption also plummeted, the Kinsey researchers found—but actual adoption rates, too, have declined.)

The reasons are impossible to name with certainty. But while thousands of Americans are relying on fertility treatments, it may be that millions of others simply want to believe that they’ll never have to. (Read More)