PREGNANCY AND CHILDBIRTH-ARE THERE ONLY CERTAIN TIMES OF THE MONTH WHEN A GIRL CAN GET PREGNANT AND IF SO, WHEN?

Whenever we discuss sexual intercourse, questions about pregnancy and childbirth naturally come up. Here are just some of the questions we’ve been asked.

Are there only certain times of the month when a girl can get pregnant and if so, when?

A woman’s ovum can be fertilized only during the twenty-four hours (sometimes experts say forty-eight hours) immediately after she’s ovulated. It’s only in this first day or so after the ovum has popped off the ovary that the ovum is at the exact ripeness to allow for fertilization. After that, the egg is ‘overripe’ and cannot be fertilized. Within a few days, it will break down and disintegrate completely.

Because there’s only, at most, forty-eight hours during which a woman’s ovum can be fertilized during each menstrual cycle, it would seem to be a pretty easy thing to avoid getting pregnant: just don’t have sex during those forty-eight hours. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. First of all, sperm can stay alive in the woman’s body for three to five days. So, let’s say a woman ovulated on the tenth day of the month. If she’d had sex on the seventh and the man had ejaculated, the sperm could still be in her body, alive and well, waiting for the ovum when it popped off the ovary on the tenth.

Also, there’s no way to predict exactly when a woman is going to ovulate. A woman usually ovulates twelve to sixteen days before the first day of bleeding of her next menstrual period. So we can count backwards and get an idea of when she ovulated in the previous cycle. But we can’t tell when she’ll ovulate in the next cycle because, as we’ve explained, women’s menstrual cycles aren’t always regular. One month a woman’s cycle may last twenty-eight days, the next month thirty-two, and the next twenty-one. Even women who have fairly regular periods – say every twenty-seven or twenty-eight days-will occasionally have longer or shorter than usual periods. There’s just no way of telling ahead of time exactly when a woman will ovulate. So, even though there are only certain times of the month when a female can get pregnant, it’s impossible to tell exactly when that time will come.

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