I watched the ultrasound screen as my OB-GYN counted my folliclespwbet gaming, the egg-producing sacs in my ovaries. They looked like the black holes in NASA images. I had more than 30 inside me. The sight unnerved me. My doctor seemed excited. “Those are some juicy-looking ovaries!” she said.

Her comment brought me back to earth. I was no longer the site of mysterious galactic phenomena.

I was about to become one of the rare American Latinas to freeze my eggs, a fertility-preserving procedure called oocyte cryopreservation. Latinas have one of the lowest rates of egg freezing. In part, that’s because of the cost, which varies but can reach $15,000 per cycle. Latinas are one of the most underinsured groups in the United States and are paid the lowest of all wages.

Then there’s the myth that Latinas are hyperfertile. That racist idea, which preys on white fears about our larger families and demographic change, contributed to forced sterilizations that disproportionately targeted Latinas in the 20th century.

Even among ourselves, many Latinas think it will be easy for us to get pregnant, as do our doctors. One consequence of this is that Hispanic women are less likely to get infertility testing than white women and have lower rates of infertility treatment. But Latinas don’t find it any easier to become pregnant than other women. In fact, some research has shown that women of color are both more likely to struggle with infertility than white women and have worse outcomes from fertility treatments. Latinas do have higher birthrates than other women, but this arises from factors like unequal access to contraception and cultural differences, such as the belief that people can’t be as happy without children, particularly among foreign-born Latinos.

At 35, I faced mounting pressure from the matriarchs in my Mexican and Puerto Rican family to have a baby. “You’re going to end up alone,” an aunt loudly declared at a holiday dinner party. My mother, who raised me and my sister by herself after my father started smoking crack cocaine, repeatedly lamented my decision to leave a boyfriend over his drinking problem. “Nobody’s perfect,” she said. “You could’ve had a baby and then left.”

My family members feared I was becoming the specter that haunted them years ago, inspiring some of them to rush to reproduce with unreliable men: the childless señora. The solterona. At the height of my career as a national columnist, I was on the brink of becoming the family failure.

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