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
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Why do some people flip a coin and it comes up heads 16 times in a row? Sometimes you hit the 1 in 65k chance. Arbitrary numbers, but rare things happen all the time with a large enough sample size (130-140 million babies born each year).
Timing is one of the most major issues. Even when a woman is ovulating, there is no guarantee that an ovum will be released during a time of coitus. And even when sperm does meet ovum, again, most sperm produced are considered “imperfect” and DNA fragmentation in sperm cells is now being considered one of the major causes for miscarriage. That said, one’s diet and lifestyle can impact the quality of sperm in men and ovum in women.
Age, however, seems to be one of the most major factors. While men will continue to produce sperm cells throughout their lives, quality, and potentially quantity, will drop as a man gets older. Women do NOT produce new ovum-women are born with ~250,000 or so ovum within their ovaries, and as a woman ages, the DNA within the ovum will begin to deteriorate, and mistakes like copied chromosomes are more likely to occur, which is why that women over the age of 35 will have a 1 in 300 chance of a fetus developing Down’s Syndrome. It really is ultimately, though, just down to luck of educated guesses for when the woman in the relationship is at her most likely stage of conception.
That said, I would doubt most men who want to have a child with their partner would have any major objections to trying over and over.
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Probably track ovulation and fertile windows. I’ve been adding my monthly menstrual dates etc for years now on the health app, and i have very apt predictions on timelines.
while it seems simple on its face, and people have been doing it for as long as there have been people, “getting pregnant” is still a very complicated process that is not 100% understood at all stages (why are some sperm shaped different? do they serve a purpose, or is it just a manufacturing error? why does a fertilized egg fail to implant? bad aim? something else? etc. etc.) and it is quite possible for two people who are individually fertile to fail to conceive together and medicine can’t explain why.
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Once an egg is released it is viable for less than 48 hours. So for conception to happen sperm need to be ready waiting in the fallopian tube for a healthy viable egg to be released, or couples need to have sex in that exact 48 hour window. Conception tends to be more successful when sex happens 1-4 days prior to ovulation so sperm are already there when the egg is presented. If you have sex towards the end of that 48 hour window sperm may not reach the egg in time for fertilization to happen.
That’s if everything goes well. Toss in the fact that the sperm may die in those 1-4 days before the egg is released, the egg itself may be faulty or there is a problem with the sperm that inhibits it from fertilizing the egg.
Then you’ve got to hope the fertilized egg travels to the uterus and implants in the uterine wall and continues to stay there and grow for implantation to occur which may not happen for a whole host of issues.
Even if everything goes well, for a plethora of reasons that implanted egg may not stick around and the pregnancy will not continue and the woman will get her period and never know she was ever pregnant.
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