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How Is Babby Formed? (No, seriously.)
Actinguy1
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Obvious meme title aside, this is a serious question.
My girlfriend and I have been having unprotected sex for almost five months, two to three times a week on average. (In my defense, I honestly thought she was on the pill for the first month or two, but that's not the point.) I realize that there will be a lot of people focusing in on how crazy that is, and they're right, but she is now on the pill (as of today.)
What I'm wondering is...how did she never get pregnant? We weren't trying, of course, but we obviously weren't "un"trying either. Through a combination of waiting-for-marriage highschool and college girlfriends, then a career that had me constantly moving across the globe, I've had very little sexual experience until I began dating my current girlfriend, so I have to admit to having little biological knowledge of what's involved here.
Because I imagine it's relevant: We're both in our mid twenties, I'm 6'1 and about 50 pounds over weight, she's 5'4 and 115 pounds...and is a recovering anorexic (completely recovered, really, but still obviously thin.)
She mentioned once that her mother had some kind of condition that makes it hard to get pregnant, but once you've had the first pregnancy it becomes easy.
So anyhow...what's the deal here? Is there a biological/medical explanation? Did we just get insanely lucky against overwhelming odds for five months in a row? Or are the odds of getting pregnant significantly lower than I'm assuming?
Thanks!
tl;dr: Unprotected sex with same girl three times a week for five months...how was there no pregnancy?
My girlfriend and I have been having unprotected sex for almost five months, two to three times a week on average. (In my defense, I honestly thought she was on the pill for the first month or two, but that's not the point.) I realize that there will be a lot of people focusing in on how crazy that is, and they're right, but she is now on the pill (as of today.)
What I'm wondering is...how did she never get pregnant? We weren't trying, of course, but we obviously weren't "un"trying either. Through a combination of waiting-for-marriage highschool and college girlfriends, then a career that had me constantly moving across the globe, I've had very little sexual experience until I began dating my current girlfriend, so I have to admit to having little biological knowledge of what's involved here.
Because I imagine it's relevant: We're both in our mid twenties, I'm 6'1 and about 50 pounds over weight, she's 5'4 and 115 pounds...and is a recovering anorexic (completely recovered, really, but still obviously thin.)
She mentioned once that her mother had some kind of condition that makes it hard to get pregnant, but once you've had the first pregnancy it becomes easy.
So anyhow...what's the deal here? Is there a biological/medical explanation? Did we just get insanely lucky against overwhelming odds for five months in a row? Or are the odds of getting pregnant significantly lower than I'm assuming?
Thanks!
tl;dr: Unprotected sex with same girl three times a week for five months...how was there no pregnancy?
Actinguy1 on
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Some people go one night and accidentally make a baby.
Maybe you are infertile? Maybe she is?
Who knows really, just be happy that you guys didn't have a child during that time.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
There are blood tests that can be done to see if either of you has fertility troubles.
Luck? Wikipedia (trustworthy source, I know) claims that 85% of couples practicing unprotected sex will conceive over the course of one year, so over five months it's reasonable to assume that approximately 40% of couples would conceive. Cut those odds drastically if you weren't, er, finishing inside her.
Her anorexia might have lowered the odds of her getting pregnant substantially; low body fat in women screws with their fertility.
My wife and I have been having unprotected sex for five years... still no luck.
So yea, count your blessings that it hasn't happened for you, but you may want to see a doctor if you are concerned, if for nothing else so it doesn't keep you up at night.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
getting pregnant is actually a pretty hard thing to do
Most people generally assume unprotected sex= Pregnant
or semen+vagina = baby
its uh
its not exactly a simple process, really.
My professor, a certified nurse midwife, had explained to us that over a year of having unprotected sex once a day (except during mensturation) roughly 65% of women will become pregnant.
There are a whole host of reasons you guys didn't have a kid, not limited to her health status after anorexia and if any end-organ damage was done to her ovaries, your fertility, sexual practices (vaginal ejaculation v. non vaginal ejaculation), plus her health history (you mentioned there was a hereditary trait involved?)
To make a long story short, it is a little more difficult to knock a girl up than people make it sound. It's certainly a helluva lot easier without protection.
I'm not sure how long you guys have been together, but if you see that this girl is the one for you and you want to have kids at some point then perhaps you should get fertility testing before moving forward in the relationship. I mean, it may be premature, but if kids are something you really want sooner than later, it's better to find out if you're going to have problems before you get there.
That's not what I'd do. Instead, I'd tell you to relax and enjoy the fact you dodged a rather large bullet and enjoy having baby free sex.
There's a lot of chemistry involved in putting on the show.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
A: Be fertile - this is a roughly 24 hour time frame. When you look into the "rhythm method" they say it's a week, but that's because sperm can live in the body for up to 48 hours. Realistically, you have a 36 hour shot once a month to fertilize an egg.
B: The egg needs to implant once fertilization has occurred. This does not happen every time fertilization has occurred. This is the reason IVF doctors usually do 4 embryos at a time.
C: Your sperm needs to make it to the target. Believe it or not, a woman's body is a hostile environment to sperm. Normal vaginal pH is 4-5, acidic. A male's sperm is usually a pH of 7, this is not a good mix. Because of random variations in this some people that are fertile individually may not be fertile with each other.
There are more factors than this involved, but these are some things to illustrate that baby making isn't as easy as people believe.
On the other hand, my doctor friend says "What do doctors call women that use the rhythm method? Mothers."
You won the no baby lottery, make sure you watch the birth control until you are ready to conceive.
PSN Hypacia
Xbox HypaciaMinnow
Discord Hypacia#0391
They cast a shadow like a sundial in the morning light. It was half past 10.
I mean, I'd laugh if you went all this time without conceiving only to run up against Lady Luck at the last minute, but I doubt you two would :P
which is why you get all these threads of guys being like "my girlfriend and I were gettin hot and heavy and there was a little precum but we werent actually in the same zipcode and now her period is late help!!"
I mean it's better that than people not knowing how birth control works, or thinking they cant get pregnant if they do it standing up or w/e
anyway: use condoms
Bodies are complicated.
These things do happen, and that is why some people choose to double up. With hormonal birth control there is a chance your body will adapt to the extra hormones and bypass the birth control. That is why a gyno will often order a blood test periodically to check your hormone levels. Stress can also muck things up, as can weight gain or loss and a bunch of other things. I had a friend who got pregnant on the shot, with a diagnosis from her doctor saying she only had a 20% chance of conceiving, and her husband has a low sperm count. The only 100% method of birth control is abstinence.
PSN Hypacia
Xbox HypaciaMinnow
Discord Hypacia#0391
I came here to say something similar to this.
Just because your girlfriend is on the pill "starting today" as you said, doesn't mean the pill is effective as of today.
That said, there are lots of factors that go into fertility, both from the guy's standpoint, and from the girls.
it's entirely possible that she *did* conceive, and the fertilized egg spontaneously miscarried. This is far more common than people realize (and why I'm puzzled by people insisting on the whole soul == conception thing, but that's off topic.) The egg may simply have not been viable that time around, due to the typically ~100 mutations that occur in any given person compared to their parents, or a host of other factors, hormonal, environmental, etc.
We don't really have a fantastically clear picture of the biochemistry involved in pregnancy yet (i imagine it'll be a while before we've got all of the details down pat, and can try growing people in vats)
My advice? Read up on the subject on wikipedia. Dig into various science-based blogs that cover the subject (skepchick.org for example, but there are many others in the science-based-medicine field) that discuss various issues. I find ones that actually reference studies and journals to be generally more reliable than anecdotes on the internet
This could be it.
When girls get to thin, they might even stop menstruating at all.
Or you could just have retarded swimmers.
EDIT: I am a slow poster
85% of couples having unprotected sex (not every day, just at what ever frequency they consider regular) will get pregnant in one year. It isn't quite linear but doctors won't start testing for infertility until a couple has been having random sex for a full year or directed sex (based on temp or fluid) for 6 months.
However, this varies widely with age of the woman. Sperm can live for up to a week in the woman's body if she is producing a specific fluid to keep the sperm alive. Teenage women tend to produce this fluid for a whole week. Women tend to make less of this fluid as they age. By age 25 most women only produce it for 2 or 3 days, by age 35 many women only produce it for a few hours each month. So as women get older they have to time sex much more precisely in order to have a chance at getting pregnant. Women's cycles also tend to be erratic in the first 5 years they are menstruating. This means that weird things like releasing two eggs in one month or ovulating while menstruating are much much more likely to happen to teenagers than to women in their mid-twenties. Combine this with increased fluid and there are teenage girls out there that are fertile for 2.5 weeks out of 4. That just doesn't happen anymore by the time a woman is 25.
And yeah, most fertilized eggs don't implant and many of those that do don't make it very long. Current estimates are that about 1/2 of all fertilized eggs don't implant and about half of the fertilized eggs that do implant are spontaneously aborted after about a week (when the woman should be getting her period anyways). It is one reason a lot of doctors recommend against the newer extra early pregnancy tests. Most women don't think of miscarriages as being that common and it can freak them out to have two or three in a row when 10 or 15 years ago it wasn't possible to know they were pregnant when they had the miscarriages.
Thems the breaks?
PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
truth.
9 months trying here until we slipped one past the goalie
Steam
XBOX
If you're not trying to get pregnant now, then a) you should start using some form of protection, so that it doesn't surprise you, and b) don't worry about seeing an OBGYN or fertility doc at this time. If you go to a fertility doctor they can run some tests but let's assume you're both at least fertile enough. If you're infertile, are you going to break up with each other? Or adopt? Any other advice the fertility doc would give you would be for increasing your chances of pregnancy now, so it's sort of a wasted trip.
I hear about this a TON. Seriously, it's as if your body knows you are trying and that somehow inhibits things. I think it's a stress reaction. Often, when people just relax and not think about it, suddenly they are pregnant!
On a related "contraception doesn't always work" note, I had a friend who was on the Nuva ring and she got pregnant. The tricky part of the story is that her doctors had told her that she was barren (due to her mother doing drugs while she was pregnant) and she'd never had a real period in her life (she was in her mid twenties when this occured). Also, she was about 300 pounds at the time and didn't know she was pregnant until the 8th month. Don't forget that she had gone to a OB/GYN before she knew all this and that medical professional didn't notice the pregnancy either (and also perscribed more contraceptives). So, yeah, surprise baby. Luckily it was a boy, so he wasn't at all fucked up by the hormones (you really aren't supposed to stay on the pill if you concieve, it can mess with a female fetus). She is happily married to the baby-daddy now with another on the way!
Most people take the estrogen/progestin combination pills but occasionally doctors will prescribe the progestin only option if there is a particular reason to do so.
Also, all the information about the whole pregnancy thing has been really well laid out in this thread. My husband and I fell into the camp of getting pregnant 2 months after I went off the pill (I had been on for a year and yes we were trying to get pregnant). The average when you are trying to get pregnant (i.e. targeting days when the woman is most fertile) is 6months - 1 year.
The Law of Inverse Fertility:
The fertility of a couple is inversely proportional to their desire to have a child.
It sounds like you escaped by the noted corollary:
Not caring either way gives you 50/50 odds.
As for what we are doing, Nuka, when it comes up amongst friends and whatnot, I tell people that our method of birth control is "prayer". My girlfriend tells people its "imagination." Incidentally, when she finally went to her appointment to get the pill, she actually put "prayer" on the form as current method. The woman who accepted the form literally laughed out loud.
Anyhow, just wanted to thank everyone who responded! Looks like it's a combination of luck and her health issues, judging from the responses.
Thanks again!
The Great Sperm Race
(this is the second part, where the journey begins. The first part is more discussion of sperm microbiology)
To make it nice and easy to picture, they scale the journey up to human size to show you all the terrible things you put your poor little soldiers through in order to get a girl pregnant. It's a tiny-bit melodramatic but still very good and informative. (it also makes you wonder how anyone every gets pregnant. ever.)
Edit: There's also a game!