WOMAN ABOUT PREGNANCY AND OVULATION CYCLE
Ovulation is the term for the time when one of your ovaries ejects an egg,
which lingers invitingly in the dark corners of your womb, smiling and beckoning
at passing sperm. In fact, some years ago, a medical researcher made headlines
when she discovered (upon close scrutiny), that the usual understanding of how
pregnancy occurred was (pardon the pun), a misconception. Male medical researchers
had consistently described fertilization in the way men have always described
sexual encounters.
The sperm, his smokes rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve that stretches taut over
a rippling bicep, swims valiantly upstream. He knows not why. Muscling aside
the weaker sperms, the slackers and the old sperms, our hero encounters the
egg, who’s just lying there, thinking of England. The sperm penetrates
the egg and presto, fertilization occurs!
But when a female medical researcher got her hands on the scanning electron
microscope, she found something else going on right under everyone’s noses,
presumably since the dawn of human evolution. The egg, far from being a passive
participant in fertilization, actually sends out trailing strands of amino acids
that act like fishing lures. When a strand encounters a passing sperm, it catches
and reels him in. All unawares, then suddenly hooked, the sperm’s little
head penetrates the crafty egg, who planned the whole thing all along.
Ovulation occurs halfway through the cycle—sometime around the fourteenth
day of the standardizes 28-day menstrual cycle (which, by the way, may be standard
but is by no means true for most women, so if you aren’t planning to get
pregnant right away, don’t try to calculate your infertile days from this
article!)The reason ovulation predictors are so popular for pregnancy planning
is that knowing your dates of ovulation really puts you in the driver’s
seat in terms of getting pregnant. Once you know the date, you can light the
candles, call your honey and get to work.
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