Ovulation and your Conception Chances by Day

A woman’s chances of getting pregnant change dramatically throughout her menstrual cycle – in fact, you are over thirty times more likely to conceive if you have sex at the right time! Whether you’re trying to get pregnant – or trying not to get pregnant – it’s critical to understand how your ovulation cycle affects your fertility. Ovulation occurs when an egg is released from a woman’s ovary, and is pushed down the fallopian tube, making it available to be fertilized.  Ovulation and menstruation are both part of a woman’s monthly cycle – in fact, menstruation is the process that the female body uses to shed the egg released during ovulation if it isn’t fertilized. Women are most fertile when they are ovulating, so the probability of unprotected sex leading to pregnancy changes throughout the course of a woman’s monthly cycle. When a woman is at her most fertile, just before she ovulates, unprotected sex with a healthy partner will result in pregnancy 30% of the time! But on average, the likelihood of unprotected sex leading to pregnancy is much smaller – between 3% and 5%. Women ovulate at different times in their monthly cycle, so if you don’t know exactly when you’re ovulating, this chart can still tell you what the average risk of pregnancy is on each day of your cycle. Day one is the day when a woman starts bleeding.  For most women, the chances of getting pregnant from having unprotected sex once during the first five to seven days of the cycle is under 1%. From the seventh day to the twenty first day of a woman’s cycle her chances of getting pregnant rise dramatically.  Most women ovulate during this two week period. As a result, the average woman’s chance of getting pregnant from having unprotected sex just one time is more than 4% from day 9 to day 19 of her cycle, and is over 8% from day 12 to day 14 of her cycle. After the 21st day of the cycle, most women have less than a 2% chance of getting pregnant each time they have unprotected sex. Remember – a woman’s actual chance of getting pregnant on any given day of her cycle depends on when she actually ovulates.  But even if you don’t know when you’re ovulating, these statistics can provide you with some good guidelines. If you’re trying to conceive, these guidelines may help – but you’ll improve your chances by determining when you’re actually ovulating. And, if you don’t want to get pregnant, this information might be interesting, but it’s definitely no substitute for birth control!