From the outside, Holly Finn certainly looks fertile.

With shoulder-length dark hair, smooth skin and a slim but curvaceous figure, the San Francisco-area writer could be any young mom with a baby on her hip.

But at 43, Finn says, her ovaries know better — and she would have, too, if not for what she believes is society’s widespread ignorance about infertility.

“I really feel that there are important pieces of information that don’t get passed along,” says Finn, who has now tried for four years to conceive through in-vitro fertilization. “I actually think it’s quite a brutal dishonesty.”

Most women aren't taught — and don't learn — basic facts about fertility and aging, says Finn, author of the e-book “The Baby Chase." Instead, celeb moms the likes of Salma Hayek (a baby girl at  41), Marcia Cross (twins at 44) and Mariah Carey (twins at 41) make being an older mom look easy — and glamorous.

“It’s not that we’re stupid,” she says. “It’s that we’ve been misinformed.”

As proof, she points to a new fertility awareness survey sponsored by biopharmaceutical firm EMD Serono Inc., with investigators from RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association. It was presented at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine’s recent annual meeting.

The poll of 1,000 women ages 25 to 35 who had talked to doctors about fertility found that participants could correctly answer seven out of 10 basic questions less than half the time. The Fertility IQ 2011 Survey found that women were wrong most often about how long it takes to get pregnant — and about how much fertility declines at various ages.

“We were not at all surprised,” says Barbara Collura, executive director of RESOLVE. “This is what we experience every day.”

Most women simply don’t realize that at 30, a healthy woman has about a 20 percent chance of conceiving per month and by the time she reaches 40, her odds drop to about 5 percent, Collura said.

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