Sunday

Fertility Monitors Tap into the Clues from Mother Nature

For many women, the absence of fertility monitors does not prevent them from becoming pregnant and then later holding a baby in their arms.  Some women, however, feel that no amount of lovemaking seems able to lead to the conception of a most-wanted baby. Those women often decide to use fertility monitors. In that way the woman who wants a child can better detect when her egg has been released and has begun its journey to her uterus. The information provided by the monitors does not guarantee conception, but it allows a couple to increase the likelihood that conception will in fact take place.

Society has always known that the body of a young adult female goes through certain cyclical changes. Long before the appearance of any fertility monitors, different societies had varied ways for dealing with the monthly cycles experienced by a large section of the population. While conducting research for his novel Hawaii, James Michener learned that the ancient people of the South Pacific had chosen to put such women in temporary “isolation.”

Modern women do not allow their reproductive physiology to interrupt their daily schedule. With the help of fertility monitors, however, women can use information about their reproductive physiology to keep a close watch on their readiness to produce an egg, a “target” for a man’s sperm. Such information allows women to better judge when a period of lovemaking is most apt to lead to the arrival of an infant.

Science has now shown that a mature woman produces estrogen on a cyclical cycle. The estrogen causes the maturation of one egg inside one of the ovaries. When the estrogen level drops, then the woman’s body receives a surge of luteinizing hormone (LH). The LH surge causes the release of that egg, sending it into the duct that will carry it to the uterus. After that release takes place, a woman’s basal body temperature (BBT) will normally reach a peak.

 Present-day diagnostic tools seek to detect all of the above events. The users of the fertility monitors look to the monitors to deliver evidence about each of those events. A thermometer allows the woman to keep track of her BBT. Equipment that can detect a surge in LH provides evidence that would suggest the release of an egg. If that evident LH surge comes right before a temperature peak on a charted BBT, then the woman can be fairly confident that an egg is traveling towards her uterus.

A woman who has long wanted to have children would try to coordinate her lovemaking with the information from the fertility monitors. Of course, the woman would first need to make sure that she has in fact monitored the changes in her body. She would need to be aware of the rate at which her body cycled, in order for her to make proper use of the fertility monitors. In other words, no fertility monitor is like a home pregnancy test. No fertility monitor will offer the essential information on a single day.

Fertility monitors help a woman to do what all women have been doing for many centuries. They allow women to note and record the cyclical changes in their bodies. More importantly, they allow women to plan their most intimate encounters around those detected changes. Women taking fertility drugs often count on the accuracy of the fertility monitors.