Am I Pregnant?

Am I Pregnant? By Maria Gonzalez

Am I pregnant? This is often one of the most important questions a women can ask. If you suspect you are pregnant, getting good prenatal care early is very important, so finding out as soon as possible is vital.

Am I pregnant? Have you missed a period? Are you bloated? Are your breasts tender? These may be early symptoms of pregnancy. Have you spotted, but never gotten your period? Do things smell and taste differently? Are you tired?

If you can answer yes to at least one or two of these questions, you may be pregnant. However, some women never suspect that they have conceived. As soon as your period is late, you can perform an at-home pregnancy test inexpensively and privately. These tests can be found at your local discount or drug store. The at-home tests claim 99% accuracy, and false positives are rare, so if you test positive you are most likely pregnant. Since these tests measure the level of pregnancy hormone (HCG) in your urine, it’s important to follow the instructions carefully and repeat a negative test a few days to a week later just to be sure. Sometimes hormone levels don’t rise high enough to be detected right away.

If you suspect you are pregnant, refrain from smoking, drinking alcohol and using illegal drugs until you are sure. These substances are harmful to a developing baby. Stay away from x-rays and try to eat healthy until your pregnancy is confirmed.

Maria writes for Pregnancy Due Date, a site that tries to information for expectant mothers. For more great pregnancy articles, visit our Pregnancy articles archive.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

When Can You Get Pregnant?

When Can You Get Pregnant?
By Milos Pesic

If you are planning on becoming pregnant in the near future, you may be wondering when exactly it is that you can get pregnant. If you are asking these types of questions, you are definitely on the right track to pregnancy! Let’s discuss the biology of the female body in more detail in order to understand when you can get pregnant.

After puberty hits, a woman typically has a month-long menstrual cycle. The main outwardly visible sign of this monthly cycle is the presence of menstruation, but this is not the only thing that is going on inside of your body. You can get pregnant as soon as you begin to have this pattern of monthly cycles inside of your body.

During each monthly cycle when you can get pregnant, your body will carefully build a lining of blood vessels and nutrients in your uterus. This is careful preparation for the time when you actually do get pregnant. Your body does not know when that will be, so it prepares thoroughly each month.

You can get pregnant when the lining of the uterus is ready. At this point, your ovaries will release an egg into your uterus. This is the perfect time for you to get pregnant; everything is aligned just right. If you should have intercourse at this time in your monthly cycle, then you stand a good chance of getting pregnant. This stage when you can get pregnant is calling “ovulation.” Ovulation just means that the egg is released during this time period.

If you do not become pregnant during your ovulation time, the egg will die and the lining of your uterus will become too old. At this point, your body sheds the lining and the egg in order to start all over again. This is the stage known as menstruation, when you will notice blood coming to the outside. At this point in your monthly cycle, you typically cannot get pregnant. You will have to wait to get pregnant when the next ovulation period begins in the next month.

This pattern continues over and over during a woman’s childbearing years until she either becomes pregnant, or goes through menopause. When you get pregnant, the lining in you uterus won’t be lost, but rather will grow with the baby and becomes the placenta, which nourishes the baby for nine months. When women go through menopause, they can no longer get pregnant. This is because they stop sending eggs (ovulating), and their bodies quit preparing the monthly lining.

The best way to know when you can become pregnant is to pay attention to your monthly cycle. If you know when you are ovulating, you have all of the information that you need to know about when you can get pregnant!

Milos Pesic is an expert in the field of Pregnancy and Fertility and runs a highly popular and comprehensive Pregnancy web site. For more articles and resources on Pregnancy and Fertility related topics, early Pregnancy Symptoms, Infertility Treatments and much visit his site at:

=>http://pregnancy.need-to-know.net/

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