Why does it take months for some couples to conceive despite being fertile and having frequent sex?

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All,

So a friend of mine is planning a family and haven’t gotten pregnant yet. Her gynac said they it may happen right away or may take even a year to conceive. Well, i don’t really understand this.

If a fertile man and woman are having frequent sex, what really leads to not getting pregnant?

In: Biology

44 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

In a typical case, the right egg and sperm have to meet. As people age, the odds of having genetically normal gametes decrease, but even young people have a certain percentage of gametes that are abnormal.

There are also uterine and immune factors: is the endometrial lining thick enough, for example.

The best analogy I’ve seen is to think of fertility as rolling a die. At a population level, we expect most people to roll a 4-5 sided die. But the only way to be reasonably sure how many sides your die has when it comes to fertility is to keep rolling. If after a year your number doesn’t come up, we can be reasonably sure the couple is rolling a die with more sides. But until a couple has given it several tries, in many cases we can’t rule out bad luck versus a problem

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