It would not be a great mistake if I began this chapter with some stamps. It is a well-known truth that it is necessary to prepare for pregnancy not only for the mother-to-be, but also for the father-to-be. It is the idea that pregnancy planning includes a thorough examination and preparation for future motherhood. Still, babies should happen, not be predicted, because conception is not a biochemical process, but the will of God. Of course, many will rebel against such a definition and argue that conception is physiology and a little bit more physics, chemistry, and luck. But if you ask those who have been trying and treating for a long time without success, but still cannot conceive, they will affirm with sadness, anxiety and hopelessness: yes, it’s God’s will. If we ask those who stand on the other side of the problem of conception, which are gynecologists, urologists, andrologists, reproductologists, they will gladly agree. Yes, God’s will.
For it is impossible to prepare a process that completely contradicts the laws of logic, thermodynamics, chemistry and common sense. If, however, this event does occur and, moreover, humanity is still not extinct or in danger of extinction, then there is some force that surpasses all our calculations.
Time and Conception
The female age is short. The author of this popular phrase certainly had in mind the fleeting beauty of women and the allure of youth. We look at our pictures, we like ourselves, and we hardly notice the changes that time makes in our appearance. But then accidentally we get hold of a ten-year old album, and we are sadly convinced that the changes have gone too far. And the album of twenty years ago … God, what a beauty! What was she looking for in herself? She was dieting, and disguising her thighs, and ate her own food. Time passes, and we see not the figure and styles, but the face. The face! That elastic face contour and plump cheeks, taut eyelids and strikingly carefree look are lost forever!
And these are only external changes. But can you imagine what’s inside us, in our blood vessels, nerves, tissues? How many mutations have accumulated in our cells and triggered irreversible aging processes? Certainly, the ovaries have been affected by withering. Eggs are not produced in every cycle, and those that do are often surrounded by such a dense shell that not every sperm is able to penetrate their protection. These changes begin after the age of thirty. And after forty the work of the ovaries is mainly directed not so much to reproduction as to maintenance.
In our information age, when the term of adulthood and social formation has been greatly pushed back, we still long maintain the imbalance between social and biological age. Our grandmothers married at eighteen. Our mothers married at twenty-two. We did at twenty-five, after college. Our children’s generation still wants to work for a few years, settle into careers and society, before having a family. And thirty is the optimal age for a bride. And how infantile they can be, these thirty-year-old brides! Real mothers’ daughters. They’re afraid of everything, they don’t know how to take responsibility. They are still children themselves. And so begins their woeful conception.
There are brides who are thirty-eight or even forty-three. And they are still almost children at heart. What to do if the desire for motherhood and the feeling of jumping into the last wagon only hit them at this age. That’s how today’s young girls find themselves in the body of an aging woman in her forties. Let them be pregnant when all of their due dates are up!
But historically, when the average life span of a human being was thirty years, the first decade was required for formation, the second one – for blossoming and realization of the reproductive potential, and the third one – for withering.
In addition to biological age, there is another temporal enemy of pregnancy. This is ovulation and the longevity of the egg. The fact is that a woman’s average menstrual cycle is 28 days – approximately 13 cycles per year. This means that a woman has only 13 opportunities to conceive. Moreover, the egg lives 12-24 hours, after which it dies. If the spermatozoa are already lurking by the time the egg is released, or are in the right place at the right time, then fertilization will occur. And if there is a mismatch of at least 12 hours, then the opportunity is lost.
And how, pray tell, do women manage to get pregnant under such a strict time constraint?
There are two ways to resolve this contradiction.
The first is to plan a pregnancy in time. Do not delay with expectations of a better life – when the career will settle, the apartment will expand, all the affairs will be redone … The birth of children – an event with which you can be late. There is no way to cheat time. You can only use it correctly.
The second helper in conception is sex. Yes, yes. Children are the product of love and the fusion of intelligences. What can you do about it? Therefore, children must be born where love and bodily partner harmony reign. What does this mean? That a certain frequency of sexual intercourse, which happens in couples who are loving and sexually harmonious, guarantees the conception of a child, on average, within a year.
I have to counsel a lot of couples planning to conceive, and I often observe couples in which reproductive sex flourishes. The woman plans certain days to conceive and forces her husband to make love to her on that particular day. Why is this tactic emotionally costly and rarely successful? Because the cause-and-effect relationship of love-sex-children is broken. In couples where the bodily component is undervalued, sex is given an auxiliary role in the great business of producing children. An expectant mother naively expects to kill all birds with one stone: to cover her husband’s need for sexual release and to conceive. A very important component – attraction – is excluded from sexual intercourse. Sex does not happen spontaneously, it is scheduled, according to the expected date of ovulation. Needless to say, this tactic is ineffective!
It does not bring results and skewed sexual activity in the direction of daily exercise. It takes two to five days to restore the vital properties of sperm. This means that a longer period of abstinence contributes to the stagnation of the male semen. The vitality of sperm decreases, they begin to dissolve, and the cells of the testicular appendage spread them out into components.
That is why adjusting the rhythm of sexual activity to ovulation (once every four weeks) is unsuccessful. The sperm is not of the right quality to fertilize the egg. But in the opposite case, when the semen flow is very frequent – every day and more often – the sperm does not have time to accumulate in the ejaculate in sufficient quantity and quality. Daily sex may be a pleasant pastime for loving spouses, but from the point of view of conception it is pointless, because by ejaculating so often, the man is churning back and forth more like water than semen. This is detrimental to the prospects of conception.
That’s why reproductive scientists, the doctors in charge of reproductive health, often joke that the best way to prevent pregnancy is to have sex once a month or have sex every day.
For proper conception, I recommend regular frequent sex – every other day. That means no less frequent or more frequent lovemaking.
An egg ready to be fertilized lives in a woman’s reproductive tract for 12 to 24 hours and then dies. Therefore, conception requires that spermatozoa either wait in the bush (in the villi of the oviducts) or enter a woman’s genital tract at about the same time and come out to meet the egg. This event is possible just by having sex about 48 hours apart. With this rhythm, you can not be guided by ovulation dates, not time it to special days, relax and really conceive in love, not in calculus.
This is how time sets a certain framework for conceiving children, which I think encourages people to treat their task of continuing and preserving their lineage more responsibly.