Dr. Brennan Peterson, Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of Marriage and Family Therapy program, was cited in an article in the Canadian news website Maclean’s. The article, “Thirty-Seven and Counting”, highlights the misconceptions currently held about women’s fertility. The age at which women experience a decline in fertility is much younger than we believe, and, according to Dr. Peterson:

 “[Women are] viewing [infertility] as after 40, sometimes after 45 or 50,” says author Brennan Peterson, a psychology professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. “That’s so beyond the mark.” A woman freezing her eggs at 38 “is doing it at the wrong time,” he says. “The time to freeze them, in truth, is when she’s in her mid-20s.” Of course, planning a life is rarely so simple. “It would take a very forward-thinking woman to do that,” Peterson says. “Most people don’t believe they’re at risk for infertility if they delay.”

The article covers a variety of infertility treatments, such as IVF, egg donation and egg freezing, and provides anecdotal and statistical evidence to demonstrate the success of each treatment.

Dr. Peterson researches the mental health implications of infertility including couple coping processes and fertility awareness issues.  He is a member of the Copenhagen Multi-Centre Psychosocial Infertility (COMPI) Research Program at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.  He also collaborates with researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden, the London Health Sciences Centre in Canada, and with the members of the Special Interest Group in Psychology and Counseling of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE).  He has delivered numerous national and international presentations on his infertility research in the United States, Europe, and China, and he has published articles in Human Reproduction, Fertility & Sterility, Family Process, Family Relations, Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, Contemporary Family Therapy, The Family Journal, and the Journal of Personal and Social Relationships.

Maclean’s is the number one news and information website in Canada. It has 350,000 unique visitors and 1.6 million impressions monthly.