Best Practices To Get Pregnant

For some women, conceiving can be as easy as tossing out their contraception, whether they're working on their first baby or their fourth. For others, reaching the goal of fertilization becomes a nightly chore, a mad mating dance that revolves around ovulation kits, specific sexual positions, and, more and more commonly, a succession of fertility tests to help pinpoint possible problems.

Whether you've just started trying to become pregnant or have been at it for a while, heeding some common sense advice that's based on good science can help boost your odds of conceiving. Here, noted fertility experts from around the country have outlined the do's, don'ts, and don't-bother-withs of getting pregnant.

Have sex frequently. It may seem like a no-brainer, but given many couples' hectic schedules, it's easy to overlook this one. If you're not timing your cycles or you have irregular periods, you can cover your bases by having sex every other day, say fertility specialists.

Figure out when you ovulate. Women with very regular 28-day cycles can just count 14 days from the first day of their period to determine their ovulation date. If your cycles aren't regular (or even if they are), an ovulation kit can help you pinpoint your most fertile time.

Most ovulation kits measure the level of luteinizing hormone (LH) --- one of the hormones that signals the ovaries to release an egg -- present in your urine. LH begins to surge around 36 hours before you ovulate, but most kits don't detect it until 24 hours prior. A woman with a 28-day cycle should start testing her urine on day nine or ten after the start of her period so she doesn't miss her surge.

Monitoring cervical mucus is another way to track ovulation. "It's not as reliable as a kit," says Sandra Carson, M.D., professor of ob-gyn at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, "but it doesn't cost anything." This method involves checking your secretions for a few months until you notice a pattern. Estrogen causes mucus to thin after your period, while rising levels of progesterone right after ovulation make it thicken. Once you pinpoint when you ovulate, you can plan to have sex several times leading up to that day.

In fact there could be drawbacks as we could not avoid that in any instance. Many women find this method inconvenient or inaccurate since such factors as nursing and antihistamines, even fertility drugs, can dry up mucus.

Charting your basal body temperature is useful for figuring out when you ovulate. "Your temperature usually dips by half a degree 24 hours before you ovulate; then it goes up as you ovulate," says Pette Zarmakoupis, M.D., an ob-gyn and director of the Kentucky Center for Reproductive Medicine, in Lexington. But since basal body temperature can be thrown off by a number of things, such as illness, don't rely on it alone.

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