Ovulation and Sperm

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-30-2003
Ovulation and Sperm
1
Wed, 10-20-2004 - 12:25am
If you have sex on lets say a Tuesday and you miss Wednesday's pill and immediately stop having sex, can't you still get pregnant becuase sperm can live inside of you and you can ovulate becuase you missed a pill? Or have I confused a few things?

Secondly, if the condom failure rate is around 87%, doesnt that mean that the condoms are actually failing 80% of the time but people are only getting pregnant about half of the time they fail? Does that mean 80% of the time condoms are really failing?

Just curious
iVillage Member
Registered: 12-30-2003
Wed, 10-20-2004 - 1:35am
Hi laker_sweetie, welcome back!

"If you have sex on lets say a Tuesday and you miss Wednesday's pill and immediately stop having sex, can't you still get pregnant becuase sperm can live inside of you and you can ovulate becuase you missed a pill?"

There are no guarantees when dealing with contraception, however... Assuming you have been doing everything correctly up to the point of missing the pill then you are probably ok. That's because it will take some time, after the missed pill for the ovulation process to get to the point that you are actually fertile. As long as you aren't fertile then sperm can only live a few hours inside you. If you are fertile then sperm reaching your fertile cervical mucus can live as long as 4 or 5 days.

"if the condom failure rate is around 87%, doesnt that mean that the condoms are actually failing 80% of the time but people are only getting pregnant about half of the time they fail? Does that mean 80% of the time condoms are really failing?"

Whoa girl! Hold on a minute! Planned Parenthood http://www.plannedparenthood.org/bc/bcfacts2.html says that in typical use the failure rate for male condoms is 15% (85% effective) and in perfect use the failure rate is 2% (98% effective) How about that? We ok now?

Take care,

      Jill