Optimizing Your Chances for Becoming Pregnant
Posted on September 24, 2007
Filed Under Pregnancy Care |
Once a couple makes the commitment to start, expand, or complete a family, it often becomes crucial to them to accomplish this goal as soon as possible. In their fervor to achieve pregnancy, many couples diminish their chances by having sex too often. Daily sex may lower sperm counts, reducing the chance of one reaching the egg. The best advice for getting pregnant is to continue your normal sexual activity, without contraception, of course, and see if you get pregnant within a few months.If this doesn’t happen, you can optimize your chances by having sexual intercourse every other day (or night), starting about a week after your menstrual period begins. If you know when you ovulate recent studies suggest that daily intercourse in the few days preceding ovulation may give you a greater chance for getting pregnant than sex every other day. Your partner should not wear pants or underwear that is too tight, and avoid excess alcohol and marijuana. These substances can adversely affect the number or quality of sperm. Some evidence shows that cigarette smoking also may affect sperm quality.
A variety of easy-to-use home kits that demonstrate the fertile time in a woman’s cycle through urine testing are now available. They are expensive, however, and for most couples, unnecessary. You may want to try one for a cycle or a few cycles if several months of “leaving it to nature” prove unsuccessful.
If you are under 35 years old and have regular menstrual cycles, you should wait for at least a year after first planning a pregnancy before you become worried about not becoming pregnant, unless you know that you or your partner has a particular problem. If you are 35 or over, you might consider seeking the advice of a fertility specialist after six months of consciously trying to become pregnant.
If you have not been keeping a record of your menstrual periods, this is a good time to start. Physicians and midwives use the first day of your last menstrual period to determine how pregnant you are. The more exact you are about this date, the easier it is to date your pregnancy. Your menstrual pattern, especially your cycle length, may also influence when you will have your baby. Cycle length is the number of days from the first day of one period to the first day of the next. Although the date your baby is due can never be determined exactly, women who usually have short cycles-less than 28 days apart-may have their babies a bit before their due date. Women who usually have long cycles-more than 28 days apart-may have their babies a bit after their due date. Menstrual record keeping is a good health practice not only when you are planning a pregnancy, but for your entire life.
Tags:Care Before Pregnancy, fertility specialist, getting pregnant, menstrual cycles, menstrual period, menstrual periods, planning a pregnancy, pregnancy care, sexual intercourse, sperm counts, sperm quality urine testing
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