Getting Pregnant Naturally (2 page)
Read Getting Pregnant Naturally Online
Authors: Winifred Conkling
Many couples experience periods of infertility that come and go for no apparent reason. Approximately 25 percent of women have reported episodes of infertility at some point during their reproductive lives. In many cases, a couple may not know they are experiencing impaired fertility because they are not trying to get pregnant at that time. This ongoing fluctuation between periods of fertility and infertility may help to explain why each month approximately 3 percent of couples with unexplained infertility suddenly conceive on their own.
Subfertile couples may benefit from experimenting with the fertility-enhancing natural remedies and practices suggested in this book. Of course, fertility drugs
and assisted reproductive technologies can offer hope to couples with serious reproductive problems, but most subfertile couples would do well to begin with simple, natural methods of enhancing their fertility. In many cases, these low-tech treatments will work and a couple can avoid turning to expensive, invasive, and stressful high-tech fertility treatments.
W
HEN TO
G
ET
H
ELP
If you and your partner have had intercourse without using contraception twice a week for a year without becoming pregnant, it’s time to consider consulting a reproductive endocrinologist for counseling, as well as a urologist specializing in malefactor infertility. In addition, you should see a physician before the one-year mark if one of the following circumstances exist:
If a woman is over age forty.- If a woman is over age thirty-five and has not conceived after six months of regular unprotected intercourse.
- If either partner may have scarring or damage to reproductive organs because of infections or sexually transmitted diseases.
- If a woman has irregular periods or no periods at all.
- If a woman has used or is using an intrauterine device (IUD).
- If a woman has a history of endometriosis, pelvic infections, abdominal or urinary tract surgery, polycystic ovarian syndrome, or exposure to toxic chemicals or radiation.
- If a man has a history of mumps, measles, very high fevers, or exposure to toxic chemicals or radiation.
- If either partner is the child of a mother who took the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) during pregnancy to prevent miscarriage. DES daughters often suffer from a range of reproductive problems; DES sons may have low sperm counts and other sperm anomalies.
M
ILESTONES TO
R
EMEMBER
- 1978: The world’s first “test-tube baby,” Louise Brown of Great Britain, was born.
- 1981: The first American test-tube baby, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, was born in Norfolk, Virginia.
- Mid-1980s: Surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead fought to maintain custody of the infant “Baby M,” to whom she gave birth under contract with another couple.
- 1992: A sixty-two-year-old Sicilian widow became pregnant through artificial insemination with sperm that had been collected from her husband and frozen before he died.
- 1992: A fifty-three-year-old California grand-mother gave birth to twin girls for her daughter. The babies were conceived in a petri dish using sperm from her son-in-law and eggs donated by a twenty-year-old woman.
- 1993: Several grandmothers gave birth to their own grandchildren, using eggs provided by their daughters and sperm from their sons-in-law.