Misconceptions About Conception
Modern women have taken sex education since middle school, and can ask their friends, parents and the Internet for reproductive...
Modern women have taken sex education since middle school, and can ask their friends, parents and the Internet for reproductive health advice. But when today’s ladies want to try conceiving, it turns out, getting tips online and getting it on aren’t always sufficient. There are still a lot of facts that women don’t know about having a baby.
In 2014, researchers from Yale University surveyed 1,000 women about reproductive health. Their responses were pretty shocking: more than half of the participants held five major misconceptions about their fertility. These misunderstandings were:
- having sex more than once a day does not increase your chance of conception;
- women with painful periods may have a harder time conceiving;
- women are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have;
- folic acid is necessary to the development of a healthy fetus; and finally
- having sex prior to ovulation will increase your likelihood of getting pregnant.
We first asked Dr. Jennifer Wu, an OBGYN at Lennox Hill Hospital in New York City, to clear up these common misconceptions. Then we turned to new mother Holly Pai from Brooklyn for a firsthand account about the possible effects of pregnancy misinformation. With the help of these women, we put to rest any antiquated misconceptions about conception.