Getting pregnant is a tricky thing. The hormones of the body must be properly working, there must be patent fallopian tubes (at least one) and the sperm must be able to get up to the egg to fertilize it. After that, the uterine lining must be prepared to accept the embryo so it can implant. If you are on Mirena or with another type of IUD, you can technically fertilize the egg but it will not implant with IUD in place.
Statistically, you have a 50:50 chance of getting pregnant each month if you have sex within two days of ovulation and are under the age of 27. Fertility drops off after that so that at 40, your chances of getting pregnant are about 20-25 percent. At 45, this number drops to below 18 percent and, at 50, the number drops to near zero. By age 55, you will not likely get pregnant unless you use assisted fertilization with hormonal treatments and a younger woman’s eggs.
What are the Chances of Getting Pregnant on Birth Control?
This depends on the type of birth control. With condom use, for example, 21 percent of women will get pregnant after a year with regular condom use. This number goes up if you only use condoms during ovulation because you can’t always predict when you will ovulate. You can also get pregnant with pulling out methods as you can get pregnant from just having precum in your vagina. Certainly, the chances are much higher to get pregnant if you have sex without a condom. Do not have unprotected sex if you don’t want to get pregnant.
You have lesser chances of getting pregnant with tubes tied or if you are on depo. If the tubes are tied, and a section is cut out of the tube, the chances of getting pregnant are much less. Depo Provera has a 1 in a thousand chance of getting pregnant while using it. The best chance of being pregnant while on depo is when you accidentally got pregnant before the depo shot was given.
You can get a girl pregnant with PCOS, but this is not easy. PCOS is a common cause of infertility, and you may need the advice and management of a fertility specialist to get pregnant. The same is true of a woman with endometriosis. Sometimes interventions are necessary to get pregnant and your odds of getting pregnant the first time you try are very low. The chances of getting pregnant on Nuvaring are about the same as being on a birth control pill.
The chances are less than one in a hundred, provided the ring is used correctly and at all times.
What are the Chances of Getting Pregnant from Precum?
Precum is the semen that comes out just before full ejaculation. Precum contains sperm so you can still get pregnant if you pull out before ejaculating. Pulling out is not a good method of birth control, specifically, because precum can get you pregnant.
How to Increase the Chances of Getting Pregnant
How to Increase the Chances of Getting Pregnant?
If you are trying to get pregnant, you must stop all forms of birth control, and you must have sex regularly, especially before ovulation. If you have sex on fertile days between the ninth and fourteenth day of the cycle, you can get pregnant. The best ways to get pregnant are to have sex two or fewer days before ovulation when you are most fertile.
If you have ovulation problems, you might want to try to get pregnant on Clomid. Clomid stimulates the ovaries to make more eggs, so you ovulate on time. You can run the risk of having twins on Clomid but the odds of being pregnant with twins are only about 11 percent of the time. Clomid is given on days 5-9 of the cycle so as to stimulate egg production. Then you have sex on fertile days, which are days 9-14. This is when the sperm can live inside the uterus and fallopian tubes until the time of ovulation on the fourteenth day, and you can still get pregnant.
Clomid is good for women who don’t ovulate on a regular basis. For women with other fertility problems, things like techniques with IUI might have to be done to maximize fertility. If IUI doesn’t work, then you may need to go ahead with in vitro fertilization, which takes eggs harvested from the woman or from a donor and fertilizes the eggs outside of the body, creating several embryos. The embryos are implanted at one to two embryos per cycle until the eggs run out or until the woman gets pregnant. For some women, this is the only way to get pregnant.
Getting Pregnant with Ovarian Cysts
If you have ovarian cysts, your fertility is diminished. Ovarian cysts can be isolated or can be a part of polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is a condition where the woman has many non-functional cysts that interfere with ovulation and the passage of the egg down the fallopian tubes. One way of getting pregnant with ovarian cysts is to have the cystic parts of the ovaries removed or to have eggs harvested and treated with in vitro fertilization. When this happens, the cysts do not get in the way of implantation and the woman can get pregnant as long as the hormonal milieu is optimal for implantation.
Find out more about this topic here: Getting Pregnant with PCOS: There’s Still Hope
Getting Pregnant with Endometriosis
Endometriosis can cause scar tissue in the pelvis which can interfere with ovulation and the normal passage of eggs down the fallopian tube. Women with endometriosis can have surgery to remove the endometrial tissue and scar tissue from the pelvis, thus increasing fertility. This procedure can be done with a laparoscope that uses small incisions to look into the pelvis and remove the endometrial tissue. Sometimes a hysterosalpingogram can be done that can flush endometrial tissue out of the tubes, creating patent tubes that will then restore fertility. If you have endometriosis, you can seek the advice of a fertility specialist to get the kind of treatment necessary to have the maximum amount of fertility.
Getting Pregnant with IUI
IUI stands for intrauterine insemination. It is helpful when fertility is reduced due to slow moving sperm or to unknown causes. The sperm is isolated from the male and washed carefully. At the time of ovulation, the sperm is inserted into the uterus so that the semen bypasses the cervix and ends up directly in the uterus. This can improve fertility, especially when used along with Clomid to enhance the number of eggs released per cycle. IUI is usually done by a fertility specialist working with an andrology lab that can prepare the washed sperm.
It can also be done when a man has insufficient sperm. Sperm can be collected from several ejaculations and combined together inside the uterus at the same time. Some couples even mix the husband’s sperm with donor sperm to enhance fertility. The donor sperm may be the one that inseminates the egg, but the couple won’t know whether or not this was the case unless paternity testing is done later on. It is a way of giving hope to the couple that the man’s sperm might be the one to fertilize the egg.
Trying to Get Pregnant with Twins
Twins are hard to predict. For a woman who wants twins, she has two choices, neither of which are foolproof. She can undergo treatment with Clomid in order to stimulate more eggs. In such cases, there is an 11 percent chance of having twins. The woman can also undergo in vitro fertilization and have two embryos inserted into the cervix after fertilization. If both embryos take, she will have twins. If just one embryo takes, she will have a singleton pregnancy. The odds are in favor of having twins, but this is not guaranteed.
Find out more about this topic here: Getting Pregnant with Twins: What Should You Know?
Trying to Get Pregnant with Irregular Cycles
If a woman has irregular cycles, it means that she is not ovulating or that she is consistently ovulating later on in the cycle than the fourteenth day. If the woman is not ovulating, the periods tend to be very short with heavy periods every three weeks or so. Taking Clomid can help this kind of problem by stimulating ovulations each cycle. There are other more complicated ways of enhancing ovulation, but Clomid is used more commonly and is inexpensive to try. If the cycles are long, it does not mean the woman is not ovulating but usually means she is ovulating late in the cycle. If the couple has sex at least every other day throughout the month, this may not be a problem at all because the ovulation eventually happens and the sperm will be there when it happens. It is harder to date a pregnancy when the cycles are long, but an early first trimester.
If the cycles are long, it does not mean the woman is not ovulating but usually, means she is ovulating late in the cycle. If the couple has sex at least every other day throughout the month, this may not be a problem at all because the ovulation eventually happens and the sperm will be there when it happens. It is harder to date a pregnancy when the cycles are long, but an early first trimester (the 1st week - the 13 weeks) ultrasound can date the pregnancy with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
What are the Chances of Getting Pregnant in Young Couples?
What are the Chances of Getting Pregnant in Young Couples?
Because fertility doesn’t begin to drop until a woman reaches the age of 27 years, young people often have no problems getting pregnant. The odds are 50:50 each cycle if the couple has sex within two days of ovulation. These odds go way down, however, if the woman has had PID (pelvic inflammatory disease) or chlamydia, which can adversely affect fertility. These conditions can cause scarring of the fallopian tubes and ovaries so that a fertilized egg will not be able to pass through the fallopian tubes or the sperm will not be able to reach the egg.
The incidence of ectopic pregnancies is higher if the woman has had PID or chlamydia at some time in the past. The trick to avoiding complications is to use a condom to prevent sexually transmitted diseases when not trying to get pregnant and to treat these STDs very quickly after symptoms appear.
What are the Chances of Having Triplets?
Naturally-borne triplets are very rare. The rate of triplets goes up with assisted reproduction when the doctor inserts at least three embryos into the uterus at any given cycle. This is not done as much now as it was done in the past because triplet pregnancies and other higher order multiples carry a much greater risk of fetal loss due to prematurity and because IVF techniques have gotten so good that inserting just one or two embryos at a time often yields a singleton or twin pregnancy without difficulty. The incidence of triplets is only about 0.20-0.27 per 1000 live births.
What are the Chances of Getting Pregnant Using an IUD?
IUDs such as Mirena are very good methods of birth control. They involve inserting an object, usually shaped like a “T” into the uterus to interfere with implantation. The woman usually still ovulates and the egg can still be fertilized but the embryo does not implant in the uterine wall. This means that the chances of getting pregnant with an IUD in place are less than one in a thousand.
The good news is that, once the IUD is removed, fertility is restored to normal within a couple of months. IUDs can be painful to insert but, once the uterus gets used to it, it is a very reliable form of birth control. In some cases, however, the IUD can fall out and be undetected. The woman then can get pregnant because the IUD is no longer preventing pregnancy.
What are the Chances of Getting Pregnant After Ovulation?
If the egg has been released from the ovary, it has about twenty-four hours before it degenerates if it is not fertilized. This means that, when the egg has ovulated and twenty-four hours have passed, the chances of getting pregnant are very slim for the rest of the menstrual cycle unless sperm were ready for the egg in the fallopian tube at the time of ovulation. This period after ovulation lasts nearly exactly 14 days so these days you can assume you are not fertile.