fertility

A miscarriage is a pregnancy that naturally ends before twenty weeks of pregnancy, all by itself. Here's what it's all about and how it can be as an experience.

Toni Weschler is the author of Taking Charge of Your Fertility: The Definitive Guide to Natural Birth Control, Pregnancy Achievement and Reproductive Health, which is pretty much THE book for people who want to chart fertility, and the book I used to learn how to do it well in my 20's. She also wrote a great book about menstruation and charting for teen women, called Cycle Savvy: The Smart Teen's Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body. She's an amazingly dedicated and energetic person who also just happens to really, really like chocolate croissants.

Jack, Thanks for sending in your question! Although you've asked about the lifespan of sperm outside your body (and anyone else's), I would like to spend a little time addressing your fear of touching your sperm, too. That's a really important concern, because I want you to be able to be happy and...

You sure can. When a person who menstruates has their first period, it's because they also first ovulated. In other words, first ovulation happens before your first period, so when you get your period for the first time, that means you will have also been able to become pregnant in at least the one...

When your period is going to happen in a given month is determined through the whole of your fertility cycle, by a fairly complex process of hormones in your body that trigger when you ovulate, how much uterine lining you build up and when, and how, you shed that lining. The only ways that any kind...

Know what is really NOT a good way to find out if you're able to be a Dad at 15? To wind up being a Dad at 15. You seriously do NOT want to be that guy. Heck, even if you have a partner who terminates a pregnancy you caused, that's an awful lot to put her through for nothing. It's very unusual for a...

For a majority of people who menstruate, the time period you're talking about, a week after your menstrual period ends, is a window of the highest fertility: in other words, the time when most people who menstruate would be at their highest pregnancy risk. Thing is, with any question like this, we...

This is an unusual question, and I'm not sure if you intended to ask this literally, but let's see... There is no set number -- minimum or maximum -- of times you can have sex before you get pregnant. A person with the capacity to get pregnant can have sex and get pregnant the first time they do so...

No, it is not. Sounds to me like your girlfriend has misunderstood how fertility cycles work. While cycles vary between people who menstruate -- which is part of why the "calendar method" isn't a good one -- a vast majority of those people will be most fertile mid-cycle, between around day ten and...

1. The hormones in birth control pills prevent the uterus from building up its lining (endometrium) as thick as it would be under a normal fertile cycle. This effect is mainly from the progesterone in the pills. Progesterone's function in the body is to maintain the endometrium in stasis, so that it...