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
1. There’s only one egg that comes out per month, and if that one just doesn’t get fertilized, you have to wait.
2. Sperm are so miniscule that when they swim up through the vagina into the uterus, they may just miss the egg. It would be like you swimming in New York Harbor and trying to reach something, even though you don’t know its exact location.
3. Sperm also aren’t great swimmers.
4. A lot of sperm are defective, and some eggs are defective too. Some can’t make it anywhere near the egg, and even if they do, a successful pregnancy can’t result. A lot of pregnancies fail so soon the woman never even knows she was pregnant because she gets her regularly scheduled period.
There are a lot of steps internally to get from “sex” to “viable pregnancy”, and any of these steps can fail.
1) sperm and egg are not in the same place at the same time. Maybe that batch of sperm isn’t great, or it’s the wrong time of the month, or things just don’t align.
2) the egg gets fertilized, great! Now it has to implant into the uterine, and that can go wrong.
3) The implantation goes well, but the fertilized egg isn’t viable for whatever reason, so the zygote stops developing and is flushed with the woman’s next period.
You have to get past all 3 hurdles there before a pregnancy can really get going, and all of those are strictly luck-based.
A woman is only fertile for about 24-48 hours a month. If conception doesn’t occur when the Egg is present, no pregnancy will result.
Beyond that, there is a myriad of issues that can come up and prevailing advice says don’t seek treatment until you’ve waited a year.
My wife and I feel Into that bucket with secondary infertility and ultimately wasted a year of time “trying” because the doctors said it’s normal to take time. We ended up needing IVF for the 2nd and wasted a year and then two more trying with IVF.
If they want to be sure, go get a doctor that will listen and start running tests to ensure fertility.
We talk about safe sex as if pregnancy is always going to happen because it’s *such a problem* if you get pregnant and didn’t mean to, but in reality it’s statistically really complicated to conceive a child.
10+% of *known* pregnancies end in miscarriage, and there will be tons and tons more that fail before they are even known.
Especially the older you get, the more like trying to hit a bullseye it becomes. If you shot one arrow a day for a year would you hit? Maybe but also maybe not.
It’s like trying to shoot an arrow (sperm) at a moving object (egg). You have to shoot the arrow at just the right time to be able to hit it. But you’re blindfolded.
You can improve chances by measuring the hormone that indicates ovulation. I spent a year trying to conceive, then got frustrated and bought some ovulation testing kits online. Got pregnant within 2 months.
I once saw a statistic that said there is a 1/4 chance of conception if two fertile people have unprotected sex during the window of fertility for the female. So given that the window is short, and in perfect conditions there is only a 25% chance you can see how it would take a few months to conceive.
Only about 20% of embryos are viable (the rest are simply flushed out with a period), and you only get one shot per month. It’s 3 months before you have better than even odds of a pregnancy.
[removed]
Fertile is a spectrum. As, frankly, is “frequent sex”.
But probability is also a thing. If you toss a coin once a month, there’s a 0.02% chance you get tails every time for a year. Roll a dice once a month and there’s a 11% chance you don’t roll a 6 all year. But obviously, getting heads or rolling a 6 on your first attempt wouldn’t be a huge surprise.
Someone on this thread said that a fertile couple have a 25% chance of conceiving in a month, that means a 3% of not conceiving all year.
I also want to add that a lot of people “trying” don’t actually know about things like ovulation, the period of time when a woman is fertile etc. Many do know all this and have trouble for real physical reasons but I was shocked when my sister, who had been trying, was like “did you know there are only a few days you could get pregnant?!”
Latest Answers