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Trying to conceive can be frustrating. The fact of the matter is that struggling with fertility sometimes causes you to call into question your value as a person, and as a woman.

To make matters worse, advanced fertility treatments – such as IVF – are often out of the reach of some people. Insurance doesn’t always pay for such treatments, and you can be looking at $15,000 or more in costs out of pocket before it’s all said and done.

Male infertility problems harder to treat

To make matters worse, it seems as though male fertility problems are even more difficult to handle. Some men don’t want to deal with the idea that they’re not virile, so they’re reluctant to seek treatment.

Some can be helped, but solutions are fewer and far between than they are with women.

Others simply can’t be helped; either they produce healthy sperm in sufficient quantities, or they don’t.

Alternatives in the face of male infertility

Sometimes, you can feel quite desperate. Consider, for example, the young woman in Jamaica who wrote a letter to her local newspaper’s doctor’s advice column. She’s asking whether it would be all right to simply get another man to impregnate her, without letting her husband know.

Obviously, this causes all sorts of questions and problems.

It’s not so much that couples shouldn’t consider surrogacy or even using donor sperm; in fact, donor sperm is quite common a practice among couples where male factor infertility is a problem.

It’s more about the relationship issue. Honesty with your partner is key to a lifelong foundation of happiness and togetherness. Without that kind of connection, you can’t expect a relationship to last. It’s just that simple.

Making decisions together

It can be difficult, when a man is reluctant to talk about his infertility problems, to get him to look at various options. He may not fully understand just how strong your desire is to have children, or he may simple be embarrassed. If you find yourself in that situation, consider visiting a doctor together, or even look into couples’ therapy.

So, what about you? Have you experienced fertility problems as a couple? What alternatives are you willing to explore?

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Trying to get pregnant can be a frustrating thing, and in many cases you’re not sure where to turn. Sure, you can talk to a fertility doctor, but that opens up a whole new area of concern. Fertility treatments can get expensive, and often aren’t covered by insurance. Fertility drugs are pretty effective and relatively cheap, but they carry with them other risks. Many women choose to explore alternative options either before seeking fertility treatments or while they’re getting fertility treatments. One of the alternative options is acupuncture.

Get to the point

Acupuncture utilizes specific points inside the body to affect your fertility. These pressure points are gently poked with an acupuncture needle. It’s believed that this stimulates the corresponding organs or body systems. So, for example, one acupuncture point might help to stimulate the ovaries, increasing the chance of ovulation.

Generally speaking, acupuncture is fairly painless. The needles are small, and you feel only a mild prick when they go in.

Some scientific backing

While acupuncture is one of the oldest forms of medicine, dating back centuries, there is some medical research that suggests it may truly have a scientific basis. It’s thought that acupuncture may help improve blood flow to both the uterus and the ovaries. This makes the body much more ready to conceive.

Obviously, acupuncture is considered alternative medicine, and it’s not likely to be adopted on a widespread basis anytime soon. That doesn’t mean it’s not effective for some women, of course.

Stress and TTC

We’ve talked before many times about how stress can affect your ability to conceive. Perhaps one of the most demonstrable ways that acupuncture can help with trying to get pregnant is in the area of stress. Acupuncture can help to reduce stress, and cause your brain to release endorphins, those stress-killing, mood-improving chemicals. When the body is less stressed, you’re more likely to ovulate, and to have a higher chance of getting pregnant.

Acupuncture can’t fix medical causes of infertility such as a hormonal imbalance or blocked fallopian tubes. However, when used alongside medical treatment, it may just give you the extra push you need in order to be able to get pregnant.

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Somewhere around one in five cases of infertility are due to causes that just can’t be explained. The fact of the matter is that, while we’re starting to understand quite a bit about conception and about what kinds of things can interfere with trying to make a baby, there are many instances in which the cause isn’t readily identifiable.

Truth be told, that fact really stinks. If you’re having trouble trying to conceive, the last thing you want the doctor to say is, “we can’t figure out why you aren’t getting pregnant.” You want her to tell you that it’s just a matter of cutting back on saturated fats, or that your husband needs to switch from briefs to boxers. The worst thing you can imagine hearing is that there isn’t an identifiable cause.

In some instances, the cause of infertility is some subtle factor in your biochemistry or your immune system that can’t be detected with current testing methods. It could be that there are a number of different issues that might not normally keep you from conceiving, but when they all add up it equals infertility.

The good news is that the unexplained isn’t always untreatable. The fact is that, even if your doctor can’t figure out what’s causing your fertility struggles, there is a course of treatment to follow that may yield positive results. You’ll probably start out on some fertility medications, such as Clomid, designed to boost ovulation. In addition, you might try things like diet and exercise, stress reduction, lifestyle changes, and even maca root in order to boost your chances.

If that doesn’t result in conception, your doctor will probably suggest moving on to IUI (Intrauterine Insemination, the most common form of artificial insemination. Failing that method, more aggressive fertility interventions like In Vitro Fertilization might be considered.

If you’ve been diagnosed with unexplained infertility, don’t lose hope. The fact is that it’s not a definite “no, you can’t get pregnant” answer. What it means is that treatment may be slow, that it will probably be progressive, and that there is no promise of success. However, it also means that there is a chance that, in the end, you might wind up being able to get pregnant.

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Trying to get pregnant? Have you been trying for a while? Then chances are you’ve done a lot of reading about fertility. You’ve probably learned how to chart your basal body temperature. You might have learned more than you care to know about cervical mucus. There are a number of aspects to fertility from a woman’s perspective that can be investigated.

The other side of the equation – your partner’s side – has just one primary element: sperm. Sperm is your partner’s entire contribution to the process (on a biological level, anyways). It’s also the one aspect of fertility that you can’t directly manage.

When there are problems with sperm, such as low sperm count or abnormal sperm, you can have some serious fertility problems.

Here are some facts you should be aware of when it comes to those little swimmers:

• Sperm determines gender. Your baby’s gender will be determined by the chromosomes in that lucky sperm that fertilizes your egg. If it has an X chromosome, it’s going to be a girl. If it has a Y chromosome, it’s going to be a boy. (If only we’d known this throughout history!)
• There are somewhere around 350 million sperm released during ejaculation. Of those, the fastest, healthiest one is the one that’s going to fertilize the egg.
• Sperm is tiny. They’re the smallest cells in the human body.
• It takes 72 days to make a sperm cell. Over the course of his life, your partner is going to make an average of 12 trillion of them.
• Some lifestyle choices can greatly impact sperm. Alcohol and drug abuse, as well as smoking, can all reduce sperm count by as much as half.
• Semen is made up of all sorts of stuff. It not only carries the sperm, but it also contains metals, salts, sugars, lipids, hormones, amino acids, enzymes, and more. It all works to protect sperm on that journey.
• The sperm’s journey is a fast one, relatively speaking. They move around three millimeters per minute, swishing their tail about 200 times to make that distance.

So, there you have it. All the sperm facts you could want (and probably more!)

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It’s tough, struggling with infertility. You can become so wrapped up in the hopes and dreams of becoming pregnant, that when it doesn’t happen you can feel devastated. It seems like fate is stacked against you, and you begin to question even your most basic principles. The prospect of not being able to conceive seems to change the look of your entire future.

The question, for many women, comes down to this: what would you do to become pregnant?

In your quest to have a baby, you might have to face some tough choices. Here are some of the kinds of choices you may have to face in your quest to become pregnant:

• Choices about lifestyle. You might need to make some very serious lifestyle changes if you want to become pregnant. For some women, diet and exercise habits can stand in the way of pregnancy. It might be that you need to quit smoking, or learn to cope better with stress. In some cases, these lifestyle choices have a significant impact on whether or not you become pregnant.
• Choices about education. Some couples just get lucky; they decide they want to have a child, have sex some time around when the woman guesses she’s ovulating, and they get pregnant. Others aren’t so lucky. You may need to do some learning about fertility, and to educate yourself about the kinds of things that can affect fertility.
• Choices about looking for help. There are some conditions that are going to prevent you from becoming pregnant no matter what lifestyle choices you make, or what you know. Sometimes, you need to talk to a doctor. Timing, supplements, lifestyle changes and such can’t combat every fertility problem.
• Choices about advanced reproductive technology. For some couples, there’s not going to be any chance of getting pregnant without advanced and expensive treatments like IVF. Deciding whether you can afford these kinds of procedures and whether you want to go down that road is a big choice.
• Choices about alternatives. At the end of your fertility struggles, you may need to consider whether you can still be a parent without getting pregnant, such as with adoption or even surrogacy.

So, what would you do to get pregnant? Are there things you won’t try? What’s the biggest price (monetary or otherwise) that you’re willing to pay?

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It’s no secret that stress affects fertility. It happens for both men and women; for men, a man’s sperm count can drop as much as 10% when he’s stressed. Women who are under severe stress may have their ovulation cycle affected, as well.

According to a new fertility study, women who underwent anti-stress treatments during fertility treatments actually experienced an uptick in pregnancy. Those women were undergoing a variety of procedures, such as IVF and IUI, and the ones who received help with stress saw greater success with those procedures.

Good advice, hard to follow

This might not seem like news to you. Chances are that, if you’ve been trying to get pregnant for a while, at least one person has told you to relax, and that “if it’s supposed to happen, it will happen.” That’s cold comfort. Month after month of not getting pregnant can be frustrating.

This is, of course, on top of all of the other stressors in your daily life. It’s no wonder so many women struggling with fertility experience high degrees of stress.

The actual impact on fertility rates

How much stress really impacts fertility isn’t entirely understood. Often, stress works with other complex factors to affect whether or not you’re able to conceive. Research data hasn’t given a definitive number, and likely won’t; after all, every woman is different.

The main thing to recognize is that stress is hard on the body – all parts of the body. The reproductive system feels it as seriously as anything else.

Fixing stress to fix fertility

The problem for most couples isn’t so much identifying the problem in terms of stress, it’s knowing what to do to handle stress. We all manage stress on a daily basis, but how effective are we really?

There are some basic things you can do to reduce your stress, and take that out of the fertility equation. They include:

• Exercising moderately for at least 30 minutes at least 3 times a week.
• Eating a diet that’s balanced and includes proteins, complex carbohydrates, and fiber.
• Participating in relaxing exercises, such as meditation, visualization, yoga, prayer, or others.

So, what do you think? What role does stress play in your fertility struggles? What do you do to manage it?

When we think about conception, most of us are more likely to think about bed time than dinner time. Still, studies have consistently shown that a healthy diet can help our chances of conception. Some foods are known to have nutritional properties which aid in conception.

Before concerning ourselves with specific foods which can help us conceive, it’s important to point out that the main goal of our diets should simply be to eat healthy. It’s also important to exercise. Obesity is one of the leading causes of infertility in the United States, and is a problem most of us know how to solve (the willpower to actually take the steps to solve it is another matter entirely).

While your diet isn’t the only factor (or even the main one) in whether or not you are able to conceive, here are some healthy eating habits which have been shown to help your chances of having a baby:

• Cut empty calories. Drop foods like white bread and pasta that give you little or no nutritional value for the calories you take in.
• Keep caffeine and alcohol to moderate levels. It’s best not to drink alcohol at all when you are trying to conceive. Caffeine is OK in moderate doses, though it’s better to get it through tea or coffee rather than soda (which studies have shown decrease fertility). Tea has actually been shown to increase fertility.
• Eat more protein, fewer carbs. This has become standard diet advice for trying to lose weight, but it also helps with fertility.
• Replace junk food with healthy snacks. Eat fresh veggies like carrots and celery instead of chips.
• Consider going organic. It is believed that hormones in many processed foods (and even in meat) may have a negative impact on fertility.
• Talk with a nutritionist or fertility specialist before supplementing. Supplements, including herbal supplements, can aid fertility. It’s important to get the right ones for your body and diet, though. One recent study suggests flaxseed is an excellent addition to your diet when trying to conceive. Others suggest chia seeds or Omega-3. Consult a nutritionist for specific information regarding what supplements are appropriate for you.

What changes in diet have you made since you started trying to conceive?

 
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photo credit: Ariadna Bruna

A recent study conducted by the University of Queensland suggests that a full 25% of women who are unable to conceive after a year of trying simply need to keep trying. The study considered couples who had been trying to conceive for twelve months or more, and included both women who were undergoing fertility treatments and those who weren’t.

The study found that there was little difference in the chance to conceive amongst women under the age of 36 who were receiving fertility treatments and those who weren’t. Complications in pregnancy, such as stillbirths, were also about the same for women who used fertility treatments and those who didn’t. The study found that the major difference caused by taking fertility treatments was the increase in the likelihood of twins or multiples.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t see your doctor or receive fertility treatments. Some couples have medical issues which make conception difficult. Many couples, however, simply need to keep trying. Natural and spontaneous conception may still be possible.

If you’ve been trying for over a year and have not conceived, talk with your doctor about it. She will be able to help you determine whether fertility treatments are necessary.

Most importantly, don’t give up. Whether you opt for fertility treatments or not, there are several things you and your partner can do to help improve your chances of conception. Here are a few of them:

• Get into shape. When either partner is overweight or obese, it makes conception more difficult. Getting into shape improves your chances.
• Stop smoking, drinking. Both alcohol and tobacco use affect your ability to conceive. This is true whether it’s the man or the woman who is smoking and/or drinking.
• Communicate regularly. Trying to conceive can get frustrating. It’s important to talk about your feelings with one another.
• Keep trying. This one may be obvious, but your best chances of conception are if you keep having sex. While there are some times that are better than others (like when you’re ovulating), there really isn’t a bad time for sex. Conception can occur at any point of your cycle.