Actually, that’s not true. If you are under 40 and you haven’t gotten pregnant within a year of trying, you are considered infertile and should seek medical help. Under the age of 30, it’s completely abnormal. Let’s not stretch the concept of fertility into the infinity to service an agenda.
28 responses to “Infertile”
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This is funny. 🙂
But it’s not funny that we are all of a sudden being gaslit into throwing away the knowledge that existed forever. “Oh, it’s just that menstrual cycles get temporarily disrupted.” Excuse me, but menstrual cycles don’t exist in a vacuum. They happen inside a female body and are an important indicator if overall health. My GP always asks about my cycle even though I go to a separate OB-GYN. It’s not a trivial issue.
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Want to hear a weird one? I have not received any of the covid shots. zero. My husband got the J&J back in March 2021 because he works in healthcare. Seems to have avoided any side effects (may it ever remain so!) from it.
So I was seeing all these women posting that their cycles had gone wonky after the shot. And then I saw a few vax-free ladies report similar things after their husbands had the shot. Which seemed really quite weird and not entirely plausible. But they included an acquaintance who reported that she’d been menopausal for a year when her spouse got the shot, and that she’d then had one very long, excessively heavy period right after, before going back to just being menopausal. Thought it might have something to do with spike shedding, but who knows, right? Stuff happens.
So just out of curiosity, I dug out my old calendars and checked– I’ve been keeping symptothermal charts for fifteen years, so… data. I have a lot. I checked the date on husband’s vax card, and then looked at my charts, and lo and behold! The cycle that started shortly after he got vaxxed, was the shortest I’ve experienced in years. Truncated luteal phase. 21 days. The two after that were less weird but still kind of on the short side, and after that they went back to normal. I have no idea if that is significant or not, but it’s kind of creepy, and now I want to go find a fertility-charting forum and see if it’s a thing other ladies have noticed. Because I know I’m not the only FAM-user sitting on a giant heap of personal data…
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The, uh, “FAM community” tends to be a lot of seriously geeky women, though. There will probably never be any formal research, but I’d bet money they’re already comparing data on this. I just have to track down where.
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Here, I’ll contribute what I can! I have 5 years’ worth of data from tracking my periods with an app. I’ve never tried to get pregnant and am not on any birth control (yay for vasectomies). My periods have been pretty regular all my life, but not like clockwork, and I’ve never kept track on paper, so I finally decided to do it with an app because it’s so easy.
As I said before, when I had my second COVID vaccine shot, my period was “a bit” delayed. I’d guess my definition of bit is longer than you’d expect – I got my period 2 weeks later than I was supposed to. But given that my periods usually start within a window of 5 days before and after the predicted start date, it’s not that huge a change. I get the occasional larger irregularity. Scrolling through 5 years on the calendar, this was a particularly long cycle, and on average I’ve had one of those each year. I’m in my late 30s.
Of course my data is ultimately not that helpful given that over the past decade my chance of getting pregnant has been practically nil regardless of my menstrual cycle, and I have no idea how fertile I actually am/was.
Can you imagine how much men would geek out over this data if they were the ones having periods?
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Just a note: typically, when a longer-than-usual cycle happens, what’s going on is delayed ovulation. Luteal phases for most women are pretty consistent in length, but the pre-ovulatory phase can vary quite a lot. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on unless you’re also keeping basal body temperature data and/or tracking mucous consistency, but you could be looking at either a delayed ovulation, or an anovulatory cycle where your body tried really hard to ovulate two or three times, didn’t quite make it, and finally pushed the “reset” button without ever having a luteal phase.
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Yup, I assumed it was delayed ovulation. I didn’t know about the longer anovulatory cycles where the body keeps trying and ultimately fails to ovulate. That’s cool, thanks for the info.
I sometimes get what I think of non-period periods, which happen with a slightly shorter cycle. They come without any PMS symptoms and there aren’t really cramps. I’ve had those occasionally all my life, more often as I get older. Those are pretty clearly also anovulatory. Do you know the mechanism behind those? I’d asked my OB/GYN once but I don’t recall his explanation. I’ve done some googling as well.
This is the kind of thing I imagine men geeking out about, like sports stats.
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P.S. Yes, I’ve read Gloria Steinem’s “If Men Could Menstruate” and am not saying anything particularly new 🙂
Link: http://ww3.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/p109g/steinem.menstruate.html
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I don’t know as much about the short-cycles causes. In my own case, they are mostly short-luteal-phase which I assume is my body not producing enough progesterone to keep going for the usual time. If you read Toni Weschler, luteal-phase variability isn’t a thing that exists! But I have seen it in my charts, so… (shrugs). I think Katie Singer talks a little about it a little in her book. But I think short ones can also happen where there wasn’t really a cycle at all– what happened was a dip in hormone levels that caused “breakthrough” bleeding in the course of a longer cycle. Hard to say, though. Anovulatory and delayed-O cycles are just easier to track and decipher.
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“The problem is that there will never be any research into all of this because it interferes with the official narrative.”
Studies have already been performed to see how the vaccine affected menses for women who were inoculated. More will be done. If they are large enough and collect data on the husband or partner being vaccinated, then the control group can be split and studied separately as if they were separate study populations. So, you might get lucky 🙂
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That is very interesting. That recently had covid (probably omicron). It was mild (essentially exacerbated some sinus problems I had before) and I may not have even noticed it if I were not forced to test for work. One odd thing I have noticed though is that my period came earlier than usual (that truncated luteal phase again) which is very atypical for me. I have been wondering whether there is some connection with the infection.
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I had covid right at the beginning. No cycle anomalies happened then. Just weird all around.
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Female fertility falls off a ciff starting around age 30 (some women, obviously are different: My grandma started having kids at age 41). But other than that, yes. 30 and under, get it checked out. Last woman I know (32) that happened to ended up dodging a uterine cancer because it was caught early.
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Let’s not exaggerate. 42 is when it falls off a cliff. Even at 38-39 it’s not normal to not be able to get pregnant in a year.
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I’m not. Biology is a marastre. At 38 I was classed as elderly prima gravida.
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It’s considered a geriatric pregnancy after 35. But it’s nothing to do with fertility. Carrying to term becomes much harder. Both of mine were past 35 and hellish. I hope yours went better!
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I married late, and had my first at 31, youngest at 38. Three times, I have got pregnant in ONE cycle. We have literally never had a contraceptive accident that didn’t result in a pregnancy. But I was completely infertile in my early-to-mid twenties and I have the charts to prove it. Pretty sure we could still have another one. I don’t think I’m that huge an outlier. I just pay more attention than most, and at least one of the major causes of female infertility (insulin resistance!) is extremely amenable to lifestyle changes.
I don’t think “falls off a cliff” is the right term for that. If anything, my system seems to be making up for lost time!
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There are apparently women with a special genetic profile who stay fertile well into their forties and early-to-mid fifties. Not a majority of women, but certainly some. However, doctors’ advice is aimed at the median of the fertility distribution. With most people, doing it while relatively young is probably better. (And it’s not like men’s fertility gets better with age unless they were really unhealthy in their youth and then cleaned up their lifestyle. I also hear you on PCOS, which is a widespread cause of female infertility and amenable to lifestyle changes.)
I’ve been on Mirena so no period for the last 10 years, but before that I always had short 23-day cycles, and got pregnant multiple times pretty easily. The most cycles it ever took was three. First kid was oops (age 26); second kid on first cycle (age 33); then pregnant on third cycle, early miscarriage (empty sac pregnancy) with D&C, then on the second cycle right after D&C (age 37), which resulted in the third kid.
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Of course, getting pregnant is one thing. Having an easy pregnancy and recovery is a different kettle of fish. The recovery was absolutely brutal for me at almost 40. Took about a year for me to feel completely normal. I even wondered if I’d ever recover.
People talk about late pregnancies like the biggest issue is getting pregnant when it’s what happens next that is really hard.
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I agree with this. Pregnancy and recovery were a breeze at 26. Considerably harder at 33, and enormously harder at 37. Of course, I also was incomparably busier with work with No 2 and 3 than I was with No 1, and already had children to take care of, so that certainly contributed. But for instance I had way more morning sickness with each subsequent pregnancy. 6 weeks of nausea with no vomiting at 26 (weeks 8-14, textbook), then 10 weeks with lots of vomiting (6 weeks to 16 weeks), and with the third I was virtually incapacitated due to incessant vomiting for nearly 5 months and lost 20 lbs and even with Zofran was miserable all day every day (weeks 4-22). After delivery, I felt normal within 6 weeks with the first kid and couldn’t wait to pounce on my husband again. It took me probably 6-9 months with the second and over a year with the third to feel like myself. The nursing and sleep deprivation were so brutal, especially with the second, when I was in the middle of the tenure track. Those were pretty bleak times.
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The only reason my sister didn’t go for a third kid is the difference in recovery from the first pregnancy at 27 and the second at 33. She’s very fit but even so the difference was very noticeable.
Women who gave birth at 22 don’t even understand what I’m talking about when I mention postpartum recovery. They think I mean the C-section but I recovered from that in 2 days. The C-section was nothing. But I had postpartum hypertension that was a total bastard. Went on and on and on.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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