But the magazine's weightier service pieces are solid, packed with hard data and helpful info. "How to Choose ... the Best Obstetrician, Reproductive Endocrinologist, Egg Donor, Sperm Donor, and Adoption Agency," with a full, text-heavy page for each, is likely to help a woman feel in charge of, if not overwhelmed by, her medical options. A headline that could trigger baby panic -- "How Fresh Are Your Eggs?" -- goes on to explain that "Chronological age is a very poor indicator of reproductive aging." "Over 35? You're hosed!" is not the message you'll get in these pages.

Indeed, sound coverage of fertility issues is serious stuff about a serious urge to do a serious thing. So why the ick factor? Why did even I roll my eyes when I heard about Conceive -- even when, let's just say, I'm the bulls-eye on its demographic target? I know, for one thing, it's not just personal: When I asked media critic Susan Douglas about the magazine, her from-the-hip response was, "Conceive! Shoot me now."

How come? "The fetishizing of babies is getting out of hand," says Douglas, professor of communications studies at the University of Michigan and co-author of "The Mommy Myth." "It seems to me that -- especially with a title that sounds like an imperative -- it's elevating a kind of pressure and normative message that conception is and should be the center of women's lives." After hearing a more thorough description of Conceive, she tempered her response to the magazine itself, but not her criticism of the media culture that -- at least at first glance -- it appears to be a part of. "There's been an onward march since the '90s adding up to an exhortation to all women that if you don't conceive you are not a real woman," she says. "And there's a broader trend around insistences that women become subservient to children," she adds, citing news articles seemingly critical of working moms. "It's really about getting women back into the kitchen and the nursery, when we've just spent 30 years trying to give women a range of choices -- including staying home."

Writing recently in the New York Observer, Miranda Purves sees Conceive as fertility porn -- and her friends as addicts. Citing "graphic conversations about recent sex acts, ovulation times and cervical mucous consistency," she asks, "Am I the last one whose loudly ticking clock hasn't drowned out the quiet thrum of rational analysis?" and "Isn't this obsession with having one's own offspring just narcissism?"

Granted, no conversation about cervical mucous should ever occur unsolicited. But Purves' article -- and the attitude it represents -- helped me see all the reasons I was sheepish about my subway reading. My urge to read Conceive under cover of the New York Times came from two places. I worried that 1) people who see me reading it would think, If I can't conceive from one night with no birth control and plenty of Bailey's -- i.e., if I have to resort to reading a magazine about it -- something's wrong with me, and 2) people who see me reading it will think that I'm desperate, addled, "obsessed," incapable of "rational analysis," about to strike up a conversation with a stranger about folic acid, liable to run off with that lady's stroller when the doors open at Delancey -- and, worst of all, that I am caving in to the very evil culture that wants me pregnant as badly as I do.

In other words, either I'm not a real woman, or I'm not a real sistah. Damned either way. It hasn't been that long since I chafed at a similar double standard for singles, at least those who lead zippy, independent, urban lives: If you're not married, something's wrong with you, but if you want to get married, something's wrong with you. Weirdo spinster, or retro turncoat: Those are your options. And, as you see, the expectations, snap judgments and stereotypes (Bridget Jones! Bridezilla!) don't go away when you're married (Biological Time Bomb!). Honestly, it can make a girl defensive, stressed out, pissed off and hardly in the mood for champagne and candles. No wonder it's hard to get pregnant. No wonder, that is, there's a market for Conceive.

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