Geek Out: Think You Know How To Get Pregnant?
egg:
If you’ve encountered the word “ovum”, that’s just the Latin for egg, but it somehow sounds classier in Latin doesn’t it? And more than one ovum? Ova.
sperm:
Strictly speaking, we should say sperm cell or spermatozoon (plural of this is spermatozoa) but both of those are somewhat of a mouthful so sperm works. There are interesting origins to this word by the way, it originates from the Greek for seed animal! That’s kind of a nice demonstration that although these words often seem ridiculous there’s frequently a logic to them, we just don’t realize because most of us aren’t fluent in Latin and Greek but seed animal? Yup, pretty much tells you what it does!
28d cycle with ovulation on d.14
Want to guestimate when you’re ovulating? The key is to count BACK 14 days from your next period so if you have a typical cycle length of 33 days, then you’re most likely to ovulate around 19 days, but this is not an exact science!
Last year though, Americans were clearly anxious to know when ovulating as they spent more than 100 million dollars on ovulation kits - because they’ve been sold this idea that that particular day is the best chance of getting pregnant.
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/07/09/2060212/0/en/Ovulation-Testing-Kits-Market-To-Reach-USD-665-7-Million-By-2027-Reports-and-Data.html
sex:
Ok, I know we’re trying to be somewhat sciencey here so really this should be at the very least “sexual intercourse” or even “coitus” but would you have carried on reading if I’d used those rather dry scientific terms?
Yup, didn’t think so!
stretchy and slippery:
This apparently pregnancy- encouraging stretchy, slippery gloop, is called Spinnbarkheit mucus, and it seems to increase the chances of enough healthy sperm making it to that egg.
learning how to spin and score:
If you want to explore using vaginal mucus characteristics, either for contraception (you will definitely need practice!) or conception, you might find this from the Mayo clinic interesting:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/cervical-mucus-method/about/pac-20393452
daily sex:
Many men can keep up this impressive production rate, day after day – the old suggestion that couple’s trying to conceive should not have sex every day in order to ensure the man ejaculates sufficient sperm? That’s been disproven, every day works just fine, sperm counts stay up (as long as it’s just once a day!)
estrogen:
This is another one of those occasions where we don’t use language quite right. There’s a family of estrogen molecules, all with a similar structure and related functions but none of them is actually called estrogen, they’re called estradiol, estrone and estriol. Because of their overlapping functions we tend to refer to estrogen when we should really say “estrogen family molecules”
favorite armpit smell:
A good place to start with this topic is to click on the link “lust at first smell”.
After that, if you really want to try and understand the biological basis of this weird attraction, then go for this article:
https://academic.oup.com/ndt/article/15/9/1269/1874025
conception:
Honestly, conception and fertilization are used pretty much interchangeably but if we’re going to be properly scientific then fertilization is the process where the egg and sperm fuse, if that happens successfully then conception has occurred.
zygote:
Comes from the Greek for “yoked” as in like an egg. See, they weren’t smarter than us, they pretty much named everything according to what they could see in front of them!
domino:
Turns out people really, really like watching videos of dominos falling, this YouTube compilation has more than 15 millions views!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUl295oyeIc
25% of zygotes:
Rather than give you lots of different journal articles regarding how many conceptions fail to make it to term and when they fail, Robert Martin does a lovely job of reviewing this topic, in a very readable way
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-we-do-it/201506/miscarriages-conception-without-birth
