{Collaborative content} When you decide
the time is right to start on your journey towards parenthood, you don’t want to wait around!
Unfortunately, for a lot of would-be parents, waiting is precisely what they
have to do. Even if you’re
in the peak of reproductive health, with no bar to your fertility, you’re at the mercy of sheer chance:
pregnancy is never a certainty, and you may simply be unlucky. If you have a
health condition that affects your fertility, then those odds lengthen further.
Unfortunately,
there is no single key to getting pregnant, but there is one very important
thing you can do to shorten those odds and increase the likelihood of your
getting pregnant, and it all revolves around ovulation.
Ovulation is the
event that makes you fertile: you can only get pregnant when sperm encounter
and fertilise an egg within 24 hours of it being ovulated. If you can answer
questions like ‘When does ovulation start?’
and ‘How long does ovulation last?’ you can boost your chances of
getting pregnant when you want to.
Ovulation and Fertility
Ovulation and
fertility are linked, but they aren’t one and the same: you don’t only have that 24 period in which you can get pregnant. Sperm can
survive up to five days in a woman’s body, so sex from up to 120 hours prior to ovulation can potentially
lead to fertilisation and pregnancy!
Knowing when you
ovulate is still key to your fertility: if you can predict when you will
ovulate, then you know when this ‘fertile window’
will begin. You can
consciously focus your attempts to conceive on this time when you stand the
greatest chance of success, which boosts your odds of getting pregnant!
Tracking Ovulation
The two most
common methods you have of tracking ovulation are ovulation predictor kits, and
BBT tracking. OPKs test your urine for the surge in Luteinising Hormone that causes
ovulation, and use that tell you when you’ve ovulated - it’s an easy test to use and widely available but
not always accurate if you have any kind of hormone disruption that could
affect your readings.
BBT tracking involves taking your temperature
each morning and looking for small changes across the course of your whole
cycle. If you detect a rise of a tenth of a degree that’s sustained for three days at least,
it’s an indicator you
are ovulating.
The key thing to
do is to apply what you’ve
learned to your next cycle. If your tests show you you ovulate on the 14th day
after your period, then you know that next time, you should begin trying to
conceive from the 5th day after your period to boost your chances of getting
pregnant!
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