I’ve Been Trying to Get Pregnant for 9 Months. Here’s Everything No One Tells You About the Process

The amount of inaccurate and misleading pregnancy information I’ve been given is staggering

It’s not easy to admit that you’ve been trying — and failing — to fall pregnant for nearly a year. No one talks about this shit. You’re meant to be stoic and private and quietly carry the burden alone.

But this isn’t an article about my potential child-free future. This is an article about how much I, as a relatively well-informed, intelligent woman, understood fuck all about getting pregnant. And how much false, inaccurate, and frankly fake information — largely based on judgment and guilt — I’ve been given about the process.

As adults, we hardly talk about baby-making sex. Explicit sex chat seems to be all well and good in younger years, but once it’s about babymaking, people get all coy and use words like “trying.” If they talk about it at all.

The whole thing makes for one confusing, stressful, lonely experience.

I’ve done some deep research into the murky world of getting pregnant. It’s time to shine some light on this shitshow — because you can’t believe everything you’re told (or indeed not told).

There is hardly any data on what you can and can’t do when you’re trying to get (or are) pregnant

Everything is so scary when you think you could be pregnant. That sunny side-up egg isn’t just an egg, it’s an egg with a death wish on your potential baby. That glass of wine isn’t just wine, it’s a one-way ticket to fetal alcohol syndrome.

The general consensus in the medical world is that unless something has explicitly been proven to be safe for pregnant women, they say it’s not — even if they don’t actually know. CBD is a good example of this — there are limited studies on how it affects pregnant women, and they were done on rats. So the FDA simply says don’t do it, even when it can be a lifesaver for some moms-to-be.

The jury is even out on “non-negotiables” like alcohol. No “safe” level has been proven so the medical profession will tell you to abstain completely. The CDC has even suggested that sexually active women should not imbibe at all unless they are on birth control, just in case they could be pregnant.

I get why the medical profession wants to exercise caution, but what pisses me off is that they’re not especially interested in finding out what is and isn’t harmful. Pregnant women are routinely excluded from clinical trials which means we don’t have much of an idea as to how to treat them for anything.

As Caroline Criado Pérez says in her book Invisible Women:

It is of course understandable that a pregnant woman may be reluctant to take part in medical research, but this doesn’t mean that we have to just throw our hands up in the air and accept that we know nothing: we should be routinely and systematically tracking, recording and collating pregnant women’s health outcomes But we aren’t.

The lack of data is disgusting and feels like just another way to police women’s bodies.

The result is plenty of terrified women who beat themselves up because they drank or smoked or ate a poached egg before they knew they were pregnant.

Some women are doing the work themselves. Authors like Emily Oster and Angela Garbes are using real-life data to inform women about what data is actually available to them. This means pregnant and trying-to-be-pregnant women can make realistic, sensible, well-informed choices about what calculated risks they are prepared to take.

Too much run-of-the-mill pregnancy advice is used as a brute force weapon against women. We can do better.

Sex education was wrong — it’s unusual to get pregnant right away at ANY age

Traditional sex education did a really good job of scaring the bejeezus out of every woman I know. So much so, we all assumed the second we had unprotected sex, we’d get pregnant, even in our thirties.

I get why we were, as teenagers, scared into being careful with unprotected sex. No one, society included, wants to deal with any more unwanted pregnancies or diseases than they have to. Err on the side of caution and all that.

But this is just another example of scaring women with misinformation and downright lies, like the one Mrs Galloway always told us during sex ed — that you can fall pregnant at any time during your cycle.

But no egg, no baby. At any age.

You may also already know that women over 35 have a smaller chance (around 15–20% in any given month) of getting pregnant. After all, the minute you hit that age, everyone — even near-strangers — will delight in informing you that your fertility is fucked.

But we’re never taught that even in your twenties, you still only have a 20–25% chance. And that is only if you’re having sex during your fertile window.

All of which leads to a fuckton of confused, soon-to-be very disappointed women trying to have a baby in their twenties and thirties and expecting it to happen right away.

That shitty sex education stays with you.

No one talks about implantation bleeding — even though it could mean thinking you’re not pregnant (when you are)

I have to be honest — I could never understand how women missed the fact that they were pregnant. Did they never track their periods?! (I told you, I’m Type A).

That was until I heard about implantation bleeds. When a fertilized egg burrows into the lining of the uterus, it can dislodge part of it which results in a bleed like a small period. It happens to 15–25% of women.

*Now* I get it. I get why my friend — who had very light periods anyway — didn’t know she was pregnant for over two months. I get why you could think, well that’s that this month, especially as the implantation bleed is likely to happen around the same time as your period.

It blows my mind that the world is so judgmental of pregnant women — policing every single thing they do the moment they even think about getting pregnant — but fails to explain that an implantation bleed is a fucking thing. Women can go weeks without having a clue they’re pregnant thus continue drinking, smoking, eating things they’re not meant to eat…

But hey, I guess it’s easier to chastise women who do those things than it is to actually educate, I guess.

You are not medically pregnant until implantation (NOT conception)

My mother-in-law told me she knew the second she was pregnant with my husband and swears it was within moments of having sex. She told me this when I was 20 and I took it as gospel for the next 17 years.

Until I learned that implantation takes up to 12 days — and it’s very rare for it to occur in under 6 days.

Until then, the fertilized egg-sperm ball of cells (called a zygote then a morula then a blastocyst) roams around your reproductive organs before it burrows into the uterus lining to make itself a 9-month home.

It’s only then that your body begins to produce the pregnancy hormone hCG. This is when the doctors agree you are medically pregnant.

The problem is, the internet hasn’t got the memo. Many articles — even on well-respected websites — use the words conception and implantation interchangeably, telling women they are pregnant the moment they conceive when they really mean as soon as they implant.

Yet again, the information we receive about this part of reproduction is confusing and ill-informed. And it’s important to know the difference because I’ve seen women on online forums not sleep for days on end with guilt and worry because they had a glass of wine the night they conceived.

Speaking of those forums…

I get why pregnancy forums exist now

You know the type. The moms and moms-to-be asking weird questions littered with confusing acronyms.

It’s easy to dismiss these forums as bands of “crazy” women taking it all waaaay too seriously.

You know what I see instead? A ton of women who are scared, guilt-ridden, and confused, and asking for help from women who have actually gone through the process, because God forbid they might get real-life examples from anywhere else.

They want control over their, frankly very stressful, situation. Trying to conceive for months on end is no fucking picnic. Neither is actually being pregnant. These women feel less alone when talking to other women who have been through it.

Pregnancy forums may be weird-ass places to hang out — and they are certainly not always my cup of tea — but they are indicative of the fact that when it comes to pregnancy, women feel let down, left behind, and never listened to.

And that’s the saddest thing of all.

The more I go down this trying-to-conceive (uh, sorry, I mean timed fucking) route, the more angry, sad, and frankly lonely I feel.

Lonely because we’re not meant to tell anyone about one of the most stressful times of our lives (fuck that — but perhaps a rant for another day).

Angry because of the lack of well-informed, researched, realistic information available to us.

And sad because I know there are millions of women in the same boat as me, struggling to figure out what the hell they can and can’t do, quietly beating themselves up about every single little thing. From an extra cup of coffee to the exercise you’re simultaneously supposed to do (good for conception) and not supposed to do (it might affect ovulation or implantation).

All because we are denied pregnancy research and clear, well-informed, realistic discourse on the matter.

Trying to get pregnant is a headfuck in itself. Trying to navigate the societal pressures we put women under at this time of their lives is even more so.

And I’m done with it already.

Sign up to Simple and Straightforward for essays, reading recommendations, and waste-reducing recipes to help you live more simply, slowly, and sustainably.