Brooke Shields gets personal:“I thought it would be so easy to become a mom.”

Now Brooke is talking about a similar dark period in her life — the two years before the birth of daughter, Rowan, when she and husband, Chris Henchy, were desperately trying to have a baby; how she lost a child in-between; and how emotionally destroying infertility can be.

Brooke recently agreed to lend her name to Fertility Lifelines (1-866-538-7879; www.fertilitylifelines.com), the free, 24/7 information and support line for questions on fertility, provided by Serono, manufacturer of fertility medications. The hotline is a resource she says she wishes she’d had access to when she and Henchy were going through their infertility trials, a period of two years. Typical of the general lack of knowledge in this area, Brooke revealed that, “while it took two years, it was a year before we even knew we had a problem.”

According to reproductive endocrinologist Dr. Richard Scott, of Reproductive Medicine Associates in Morristown, N.J., these are the two reasons contributing to a state of infertility, physiology aside: waiting too long to start a family, and waiting too long to acknowledge that it’s not happening. Once women hit 35, fertility starts a downhill slide. In the medical community, the term “infertility” is used after a failure to conceive after about 12 months of trying (six months if the woman is over 35).

Brooke Shields and Dr. Scott joined forces last month to talk about infertility, meeting, appropriately, at the theater where the show, Infertility (The Musical That’s Hard To Conceive) is running (see sidebar). They talked informally about Brooke’s personal journey, and Dr. Scott’s optimism. “I never thought I would have problems,” Brooke commented. “I thought we’d decide to start a family and I’d soon become a mom, and it would all be easy, and glorious.” Now, looking back, she says: “I never dreamt I would become so informed about women’s fertility.

“After a while, when you’re not successful, you start to associate the word ‘failure’ every time you pee on a stick and it doesn’t come out the right color. What starts out as a dream becomes a project that’s all consuming — everywhere you look, women are pregnant, and every song on the radio seems like it’s all about being pregnant! It becomes a very frustrating, frightening place.”

Brooke and her husband became one of the one-in-seven couples who experience infertility, the couples who are keeping specialists like Dr. Scott very busy. The endocrinologist has supervised 19,000 IVF cycles; 14,000 of these have resulted in successful pregnancies.

Dr. Scott urges couples to be proactive. “These days,” he is happy to report, “you can be diagnosed in your OB/GYN’s office in less than a month. And in the first three or four months of treatment, most people will be successful.” Those who aren’t should then waste no time seeing a specialist. “Outcomes are so good today,” he reports, “seventy percent will be successful [with treatments like IVF], and that number continues to improve all the time. The average couple in my clinic spends five months, and then they’re pregnant.”