If you plan to get pregnant some day and experience any of the signs listed below, you should consider consulting with your gynecologist to rule out any possible conditions that may require treatment: • Anovulation It’s normal for women to occasionally not ovulate in any given cycle, with causes ranging from illness and stress to coming off the [...]

There are a certain number of questions that seem to get recycled over and over again, either amongst friends or on the internet. One that seems to get a lot traction is the issue of whether or not a woman can get pregnant while menstruating. As with so many things in life, the explanation is not that [...]

Over 30 years ago, I had a slight scare when some of the cells on my cervix came back suspicious in a routine pap test. So I had cryotherapy, in which my abnormal cervical cells were destroyed by freezing with liquid carbon dioxide. The timing of that procedure was a tad inconvenient, though, because a few days later, I [...]

You would think that this would be a fairly straightforward question, right? In reality, it’s not that simple. And to add more intrigue, the answer depends on whether you are trying to get pregnant or avoid pregnancy. What? While it’s true that the basic answer is that most women are fertile for only a few days per cycle, there [...]

Can a woman get pregnant if she isn’t menstruating? Or another way of putting it is: Can a woman assume she doesn’t need to use birth control because she isn’t having periods? Actually, the answer is not as intuitive as you’d think. On the surface, any self-respecting educated person might think “Of course she can’t get pregnant if [...]

It would be fabulous if there were an easy way to count the remaining eggs in your ovary, in much the same way that you could open a carton of eggs from the refrigerator and count how many good ones remain. Alas, there isn’t, but there are several tests that, along with your age, offer the best tools [...]

OK, to be geographically correct, the ovaries containing a woman’s eggs are outside of her uterus, but for purposes of the title, are we kumbaya with me taking some slight artistic liberties? At any rate, one of the first questions a fertility doctor inevitably asks is your age. This is because it’s still one of the best indicators [...]

For women who don’t chart, they may have no clue that occasionally they don’t release an egg, assuming that if they are bleeding, they must have periods, right? Wrong. Not all bleeding is created equally. Of course, most of the time, it is due to a true period, but it can also be a symptom of [...]

One of the most common questions women desiring pregnancy ask me is whether they should have sex every day or every other day. If you are charting, you know that there are only a few days per cycle in which you can even get pregnant. (Actually, if truth be told, even if you aren’t charting your cycles, there are [...]

There’s a certain irony in the fact that the majority of women have at one time or other probably experienced mild panic when their period was a few days late, only to discover that years later, so many of them would do anything to get pregnant. Both situations are really two sides of the same coin, and the [...]