The Waterkooler

When Anne-Marie,* the president and CEO of a start-up medical device company in Philadelphia, first began thinking of having a child on her own, she was 37 and her biological clock was ticking loudly.

As much as she wanted to be in a great, loving relationship with a partner, she wanted a baby even more. “If I turned 50 and didn't have children," she says, "I'd be pretty devastated."

So after about a year of weighing her options and considering what it would be like to be a mother on her own, she did something a growing number of single women are doing: She chose an anonymous donor through a sperm bank and started her attempts to get pregnant, using drugs to encourage the growth of egg-producing follicles.