Scarleteen

My teachers in health class always made it sound as though if you had sex once you'd get pregnant. Although I know that this is technically possible, from what I understand it is also highly unlikely. On other forums I've read those trying to conceive often complain about it being difficult and taking a long time.

An app I use to track my period and ovulation predicts my chances of becoming pregnant on each day of my cycle. The highest it ever gets is during predicted ovulation at about 33%. It sounds like a lot of things really have to fall into place for you to actually conceive.

Is it true that it really is this difficult to get pregnant? And that our chances of becoming pregnant even after unprotected sex during ovulation when a man ejaculates inside a vagina is only less than 40%? If so, it sounds like if you have sex with a condom on a day the women isn't ovulating and the man doesn't ejaculate at all inside the vagina that the risk of getting pregnant is basically none.

I just want to make sure that I'm understanding the probability of pregnancy occurring correctly because I feel like the majority of high school students who've taking sex ed have been taught otherwise their entire life.

In one year of unprotected intercourse, around 90 out of 100 people without any fertility issues will become pregnant. The people with the highest risk are also people in their late teens and early twenties.

How big a risk there is for someone in one year using any method of contraception is specific to the method: the effectiveness rates of a method tell you what that risk is. So, for someone using condoms consistently and correctly, for example, that risk is 2%.

Forums where people are posting about trouble becoming pregnant won't be a good place to get an idea of this, because those are most often people with fertility problems. And only one or two apps ask for the information needed to predict ovulation accurately, so apps aren't good for getting ideas about this stuff, either.