Ladies, did you know that when you’re born you already have all the eggs your body will ever produce? You enter the world with hundreds of thousands of eggs that will remain inactive until puberty. This is a key reason why fertility declines more quickly with age among women. While men’s bodies continually produce sperm, a woman cannot make more eggs.
Infertility can be agonizing. You want to spend your time shopping for maternity clothes, comparing doctors or midwives, and setting up your nursery. Instead you find yourself spending more time, month after month, hoping against the odds that you’ll see that second line on your pregnancy test.
Waiting for that second line to appear on a pregnancy test can feel like the longest three minutes of your life. If you wait month after month with no results, it’s easy to feel demoralized. One of the most persistent and harmful myths about fertility issues is that fertility is a matter of luck. If you’re unlucky enough to be infertile, then it’s untreatable without costly procedures that are unlikely to work anyway.
People considering fertility treatments often focus on in vitro fertilization (IVF). IVF can be highly successful for the right person, but it’s also expensive. Intrauterine insemination (IUI) offers a success rate of 10-20% per cycle. This makes it a highly effective treatment, and one that is much more affordable than IVF. For couples with unexplained infertility and some other fertility issues, it’s a great option. Moreover, because it’s more affordable, most families can pursue several cycles of IUI, increasing the odds of a successful pregnancy without breaking the budget.
If you have dreams of becoming a parent, fertility issues are among the most challenging issues you can face. Thankfully, modern science has advanced quite a bit in recent years, allowing for female infertility to be more accurately tested for and diagnosed than ever before. For couples and individuals alike, the sensitive nature of infertility is certainly an emotional time, and perhaps nothing is more frustrating than a false feeling of success.
When you were in school, you were likely taught about the birds and the bees. The facts as they were presented to you were that if a man and a woman engage in sexual intercourse, the woman would get pregnant.
Seeking infertility treatment means learning a whole new vocabulary. You might have heard the term assisted reproductive technology (ART) bandied about, and wondered if it applies to you. Knowing your ART options can help you better understand your own body and weigh various options that may help.
Infertility can feel deeply isolating. Yet at least 6% of women under 44 are unable to get pregnant after a year of trying. You are not alone. Knowing that you are infertile, however, gets you no closer to treating the issue. Infertility is a label, not a diagnosis. Its causes are as diverse as the women who experience this painful experience. The good news is that, with the right diagnosis, a wide range of infertility medications can help you get pregnant and give birth to a healthy baby.
Perhaps the only thing more frustrating than struggling to conceive, is learning there are things we are doing that could be impeding our chances of success. The truth is, no one ever wants to be told what to do. Unfortunately though, when it comes to alcohol and fertility, it’s better to stack the deck in your favor than to risk the gamble of not changing your ways.
A million things can go through your mind when you're about to have, are considering having, or have recently had an intrauterine insemination procedure, also known as an IUI. A few of the questions that you might have included, but aren't limited to:
