That said, "Creating a Life" isn't just a right-wing tome about feminism's nefarious effects on romance and families. The book starts out as a reminder that science has yet to triumph over the biological clock, and much of Hewlett's bad news about age-related infertility should be listened to. She offers a persuasive critique of the fertility industry's false promises, which she says whitewash the difficulties faced by older women trying to have babies.

A woman in her early 40s only has a "3-5 percent shot at achieving a live birth through standard [in vitro fertilization] procedures," she reports. It shouldn't be news to anyone that it gets harder to conceive as a woman ages, especially given all the trumpeting about the biological clock in the last decade. Yet according to Hewlett's study, "89 percent of young, high-achieving women believe that they will be able to get pregnant into their forties."

Hewlett's reminder that the biological clock is real isn't happy news, but it certainly shouldn't be dismissed just because it's ideologically inconvenient (though having had a fourth child via IVF at 51, she's not the best spokeswoman for the fertility industry's failures). The problem with "Creating a Life" is not its facts, but its faulty analysis and insidious assumptions. Its retrograde message lies in the way Hewlett evaluates the lives of childless women, and in the self-defeating advice she offers the next generation, advice that, given the current climate, is likely to be amplified throughout the media.

Originally, Hewlett writes, the book was conceived as a tribute to "women facing 50 at the millennium." She interviewed hugely successful women in a variety of fields, including opera singer Jessye Norman, TV journalist Diane Sawyer and playwright Wendy Wasserstein. During her research, the awful truth hit her -- none of these women had kids. Worse, she writes, "None of these women had chosen to be childless."

Hewlett's definition of choice, and her insistence that childless women didn't make one, is at the heart of the book's dishonesty. The bulk of the volume is based on a study she conducted, "High-Achieving Women, 2001," whose numbers are collected in a chapter called "The Sobering Facts." Hewlett's study of high-earning career women found that "33 percent are childless at ages 40-55, a figure that rises to 42 percent in corporate America. By and large, these high-achieving women have not chosen to be childless."

How does Hewlett know? She bases it on a single vague interview question: "Looking back to their early twenties, when they graduated college, only 14 percent said they definitely had not wanted children." From this, she infers that for the other 86 percent childlessness was a hardship that befell them. One woman calls it a "creeping non-choice," a phrase Hewlett likes enough to repeat.

Of course, refusing to make a choice is, in itself, a choice. But Hewlett denies these women's agency, and ignores the way people shape and reshape their priorities. Can everyone whose life didn't unfold the way they imagined it in their early 20s claim they had no say in the matter? When I graduated college, I would have said I had no intention of ever being anyone's wife. I ended up eloping when I was 24. In Hewlett's formulation, this would mean I didn't choose to get married.

In the same way, if a woman pours all her passion and energy into her career and doesn't start thinking about kids until she's 40, she has made a choice to put her job first. It may not be fair to ask women to give up one for the other -- as Hewlett rightly points out, men don't have to -- but that doesn't mean women who don't have kids are helpless dupes.

Hewlett's interviews make this clear, even if she doesn't see it. One women she offers as an example of unasked-for barrenness says she considered adopting, but then seized upon the idea of opening an art gallery. "[I] got into this debate with myself about which was more important to me -- having a child or having the gallery. And I chose a gallery," she says. Could that be any clearer?

Yet while Hewlett graciously allows that "Childlessness need not shrivel the soul or shrink the spirit," she seems incapable of understanding or respecting choices that don't mirror her own. She quotes Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon, who frets that childless women leaders will be less socially conscious than the family men in charge now, saying, "People without children have a much weaker stake in our collective future."

Worse still, Hewlett is not just concerned with childlessness -- much of "Creating a Life" is a tract in favor of early marriage. She revives the tired idea of "the shortage of men," and tells young women, "Give urgent priority to finding a partner. This project is extremely time-sensitive and deserves special attention in your twenties. Understand that forging a loving, lasting marriage will enhance your life and make it much more likely that you will have children."

But finding the right person is often a matter of luck, and marrying the wrong person a recipe for misery. Telling women to spend their 20s desperately husband hunting sets them up for romantic failure while robbing them of the joys of freedom and experimentation. It's taken a long time to undo the stigma of spinsterhood. Hewlett's program would put it back in place.

Of course, great husbands do make women happy -- I love mine more than anything on earth. Unfortunately, "Creating a Life" doesn't have a thing to say about the kind of husbands women should look for, about the difference between a supportive man and one who expects submission. The book's covert message to young women is find a husband -- any husband -- before time runs out. It repeatedly warns that men are likely to be intimidated by overly successful women, but doesn't stop to ask if such men are worth having.

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