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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My friends have been ttc for the past 4mo and she’s wondering why it hasn’t happened.
I asked do you test for ovulation, no, we just have sex a couple of times a month, but surely it should work?
Does not understand that it has to be a specific time of the month and it’s not the same for everyone.
Told her to test and try and it will probably work. “Hm seems like a lot of effort”. They’re in for a real shock when they realise how much effort kids are…
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
So they lied to us in high school?
Months? Try years. The truth is sometimes we simply don’t know. There’s a catch all phrase they used for my wife and I – unexplained pregnancy failure or something like that. Probably a genetic issue they said. We had a child via IVF eventually, with genetic screening.
Sounds like OP needs to Google ” How is babby formed?”
Timing, stress, diet, and some people just create a bad genetic shuffle time and time again.
My obgyn told me that he hated those super early pregnancy tests because only about 1 in 4 pregnancies that register go beyond double digit days of implantation because the genetic shuffle was non viable and your body wasn’t going to waste energy on it.
For me—- it was discovered my thyroid was broken and too high soo it’s not safe for me to become pregnant right until they’re at least a 2 instead of an 8.
A few issues. First you don’t really hear about the couple that had sex once after a drunken bar hookup with some person they’ve only known for a few hours. People don’t brag about that.
Second people don’t really discuss their family planning when it results in a successful pregnancy quickly.
Third especially for couples that are older, there are a lot issues. A woman is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have. So, in her mid to late 30s, the eggs are also almost 40 years old too. The viability of those eggs declines. Even though the man continuously produces more sperm spells the quality also starts to decline as he ages. Both of those can be hurdles.
Finally planning to get pregnant is really stressful. When the woman’s fertility window opens up, you’re having sex no matter what. Doesn’t matter if you’ve had a really bad or hard day at work and not in the mood. Doesn’t matter if you just got into a big argument with your partner. You constantly get told stories of freinds and famiy who sat on a toilet wrong and got pregnant.
Each month that passes by adds to the stress. Should we go to a fertility treatment? Can we afford it? What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with him? You try every crazy thing you can, eat more this, less than, wear this kind of underwear, sleep in this position after sex, and so on.
This is an anecdote, not data, but . . . we were struggling to get pregnant the second time, and we went to talk to the doctor, and she basically said, are you having sex when she is ovulating? And we said, yes, we’re having lots of sex, and the doctor said but are you having sex when she is ovulating? We were pregnant the second month.
Volume of sex isn’t the issue. If the woman isn’t ovulating, nothing is going to happen.
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