A bit confused

[vivi_valentine]

Hello! I've been frequenting here at scarleteen to educate myself more about sex ed. And while scrolling through the forums and articles, I came across some conflicting information.

In the articles it is said that "Fingering does NOT pose a risk of pregnancy" and when I scrolled through the forums they also said that "Sperm cannot survive the transfer from penis to hand to vagina."

Now heres where my confusion started, because in another forum it is said that if the fingers were dripping with wet and fresh sperm (like someone ejaculated straight onto their hands and immediately inserted it into the vagina) its a pregnancy risk.

I'm a bit confused, why say that fingering isn't a pregnancy risk at all? Or why say that sperm can't survive penis to hand to vagina when another forum says otherwise?

So is fingering really a pregnancy risk or not? I'm so confused

[CaitlinEve]

Hi vivi_valentine, welcome to Scarleteen!

Sperm is very fragile. In order to get pregnant from fingering, like the situation you described, there are a lot of hurdles the sperm would have to survive which makes the chance incredibly low. The likelihood that it would survive the journey from ejaculation through the air to the vagina and then make it to an egg means that the risk isn't something that can be considered viable in 99% of cases. If pregnancy is a concern, I would recommend being careful to avoid the situation described (that situation being ejaculation directly onto hands before immediate insertion). But in a broad sense, fingering is not a pregnancy risk; the pregnancy risk would be that specific deliberate behavior/action.

Does this help clear this issue up for you? Do you have any more questions?

[vivi_valentine]

So to clarify, fingering can only become a pregnancy risk if the specific situation was a direct ejaculation onto the fingers and then immediately inserted with no stops along the way?

[CaitlinEve]

Even in that exact scenario, the risk isn't overtly significant; definitely not enough to skew pregnancy risk statistics.