Awful Facts About Smoking and Pregnancy

Women who smoke have a significantly smaller chance of conceiving a child, and smokers are more likely to suffer miscarriages. Men who smoke tend to have lower sperm counts; one study concluded that half a pack a day can lower the sperm count by 20%.

Babies of smokers tend to have lower birth weights and a higher chance of being born prematurely, which results in increased health risks. Furthermore, children of smokers suffer from the effects of secondhand smoke; effects that may include asthma, bronchitis and cancer. Do I have to tell you to quit smoking forever before getting pregnant?

Calculate Chances of Conception

Researchers found that couples who had sex every day had a 25% chance of conceiving, while couples who had sex every other day had a 22% chance.

Once-a-week sex drops the chances of conceiving to 10%. So, if you want to get pregnant in the most time-efficient manner, sex-every-other-day will help you get the job done while leaving you time to clean the refrigerator. On the other hand, if you have plenty of time and energy, you can raise your chances of conceiving by 3% if you want to make a nightly date with your partner. Once you’re pregnant, you can claim nausea and let him clean the fridge.

Ovulation, Conception, and Fertility Predictions by Your Doctor

A woman once blamed her doctor for getting her pregnant. It seems he forgot to tell her that the antibiotics he had prescribed for her might render the birth control pill ineffective. When doctors mess up, they mess up bad, and a doctor who isn’t paying attention can make mistakes that effect patients’ fertility and conception.

Probably one of the bigger mistakes that doctors make revolves around the fact that women’s menstrual cycles are individual. The 28-day cycle is an average, and any doctor who assumes that patients are on a 28-day calendar will make mistakes in testing that relies on accurate timing. Your doctor should schedule a test of the quality of cervical mucus within 24 hours after the surge of luteinizing hormone. Called a “post-coital exam, this test checks on how well sperm can swim through the cervical mucus. Another test whose accuracy depends on exquisite timing is the serum progesterone test. This blood test has to be made precisely seven days after ovulation to check whether your progesterone levels are correct. Progesterone prepares the uterus for implantation of the fertilized egg.

Your doctor should be aware that your cycle may very well differ from the 28-day average, and may ask you to keep a cycle journal or to use fertility testing kits to determine accurate testing dates.

(One reason that first pregnancies have historically been “late” is that the doctor’s delivery prediction was usually based on asking the date of the last period without asking how long the cycle was. This resulted in miscalculation of the delivery date, and since many women have 30 days cycles, when doctors used calendars for pregnancy information, they were often too early in their predictions.)

Semen analysis should be performed to make sure that the man’s sperm cells are numerous and viable. Measles can result in male sterility, and a high fever can reduce sperm count. Doctors will probably also take a sexual history to rule out the chances of infertility caused by STDs.

Pregnancy Signs and Symptoms

The period that never comes is the classic sign of pregnancy, but some women get a clue before that. Many symptoms of pregnancy can arise right away: headache, nausea, fatigue, skin breakouts and increased sensitivity to scent are among the less delightful signs of impending motherhood.

If you think you might be pregnant but aren’t totally sure, you can wait until the 28th day of your cycle and then take a home pregnancy test. If you take one before the last day of your cycle, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a false negative reading.

Or, you can wait another day or two and see whether your period arrives. The old fashioned method is a lot cheaper, but sometimes, you just gotta know right away. If you don’t get pregnant right away, there may be a perfectly practical explanation. If you have been taking the birth control pill, your body may take a while to get back into the rhythm of ovulation, and it may be more than a month before it’s back on track. If you have used Depo-Provera, it could be as long as a year, and again, that’s natural. When we interfere with our bodies hormonally, they respond, and it takes time for them to reset their internal regulating functions.

When you don’t get pregnant, there may be one or more reasons behind it. If your partner has a low sperm count, you may have trouble conceiving. If there are problems with the viability of eggs, pregnancy may not occur. Many very early pregnancies terminate naturally after a few days, and women don’t even know it because they haven’t even shown signs of pregnancy yet. These early terminations are nature’s way of preventing a pregnancy when the embryo is not viable.

Most women of childbearing age, if they are having regular, unprotected sex, have a 20-40% chance of getting pregnant in each cycle. Accumulated over the course of six months, your chances of getting pregnant are very good indeed. Your age also has a bearing on how long it takes to conceive. Women under 25 years of age have a 96% chance of getting pregnant within a year of trying. Women age 26-34 have an 86% chance, and women 36-44 have a 78% chance of getting pregnant within a year.

The older you are, the shorter the time you should wait before contacting a doctor. It’s counterintuitive since as you can see above, the older you are, the lower your chances of conceiving, but the older you are, the less you should wait. When people do have problems with fertility, addressing the problem sooner maximizes the chances they have of still being fairly young when the baby is born, so you don't want to wait too long. If you are under 30 years old, don’t be surprised if it takes as long as a year to get pregnant. If you’re between 30 and 35, expect to wait up to nine months: if you haven’t conceived by then, you may want to see your doctor. If you’re between 36 and 40,see your doctor if you haven’t conceived after six months, and if you’re forty or over, you may want to see your doctor after three months.

Your gynecologist will refer you for fertility testing, and if you don’t conceive after around six months of working with your doctor, you may decide to work with a doctor who specializes in fertility treatments.

Relax a Busy Lifestyle to Increase Fertility

With more and more women building high-powered careers, childbearing tends to be forgotten until a milestone, like a 35th,39th or 40th birthday, reminds us that it’s time to get on with the rest of our lives.

When the urge strikes, it’s one of the most powerful wishes known to mankind. We say we’re “nesting” or our “biological clocks are ticking”, and women (and often men) who are in the throes of the urge want to run right out and do it now.

But if your lifestyle has been built around a fast pace, your body may not be prepared to pop out a baby on a minute’s notice. Rather than speeding to the drugstore for an ovulation predictor, you might want to spend a lazy weekend at a romantic B&B. Stress and the mind do more than we know to control fertility. People who have despaired of ever having children finally give up “trying” and adopt a child before miraculously getting pregnant.

All this is to say that, while there are people who have problems with getting pregnant, most people can do it as easily as falling off a log—providing they’re willing to put in a little more time and a lot less effort.

How's Your Fertility

Without ovulation, it is impossible to get pregnant, because the eggs stay tucked away in the ovary and can never meet up with an amorous sperm.

Without viable sperm, the whole baby thing will never get off the ground, so if you know when you’re fertile and ovulating and you’re making love at those times but aren’t getting any babies out of the deal, you may want to drive your sweetheart over to the urologist for a sperm count. Like women, men’s fertility can be affected by stress, fatigue, excessive heat, drugs and illness.

Fertility & Pregnancy Myths

You shouldn’t exercise much.
Actually, one of the worst things you can do to your body is to stop exercising before or during pregnancy. Starting a pregnancy with low energy and too much weight will put you in line for joint problems, hemorrhoids, the sodden feeling we all get when we don’t have enough activity and a tough weight loss challenge once the baby is born.

It is true that some kinds of exercise are not safe for pregnant women: squatting and abdominal exercises in particular should be avoided.

But your trainer or aerobics coach will tell you what you shouldn’t do, and other than that, plenty of regular physical activity will keep you healthy throughout your pregnancy. If you’re not much of an exerciser anyway, you may want to start exercising some months before getting pregnant just to help yourself weather the strain on the back and to keep your energy levels higher.

Too much exercise would be something that a few athletes, ballet dancers or eating-disordered women do to keep their weight well down before normal levels. If you exercise so much that your periods are irregular or have gone completely missing, you probably won’t be able to get pregnant anyway because your body will have temporarily shut down its ovulation schedule. In this case, you should check in with your doctor to plan an exercise schedule that is moderate and a diet that will help your baby grow strong and healthy once you have conceived.

Men’s underwear can prevent pregnancy.
Only if you sew him into it! There have been studies that showed that men who wore briefs had lower sperm counts than men who wore boxers. Millions of “briefs” men switched to boxers in order to do their part in making a baby, enduring the discomfort of having everything suddenly loose around their legs until their partners passed the pregnancy test. There are also studies that have shown no statistical difference in the fertility of men due to their underwear. The scientific opinion seems at this point to be that it doesn’t much matter what a man does with his underwear as long as he takes them off every once in awhile. That’s pretty much key in babymaking.

Men should postponed sex to “store up” sperm.
Naah. Unless a man has a definite problem with low sperm count, he has plenty and I mean PLENTY of sperm to get the job done, each and every time.

Women can’t get pregnant during menstruation.
While technically this is true, let’s discuss the exception that makes hundreds of women into mothers each year. While during your period you can’t get pregnant because you are not ovulating, you can have sex during your period, the sperm can hang around for a sperm lifespan of five days, and if you ovulate a little early while that sperm is still enjoying his post-coital cigarette, hey! Presto! And you’re pregnant. The chances are slim, though, and if you’re trying to get pregnant, sex during your period probably won’t be much help on the path to parenthood.