If you have not succeeded in becoming pregnant and are concerned about your fertility, remember that getting pregnant is a very complex process. In fact, there is only around a 25% probability that an average couple will succeed in a specific month (this percentage drops rapidly as a woman gets older). For some couples time and careful planning will be required in order for them to achieve their goal of having a child. Certainly, if both partners have relatively low fertility, then pregnancy can be a long time coming.

But before you and your partner subject yourselves to fertility tests, there are a few steps you can take yourselves to improve your chance of success. These include monitoring the woman’s monthly cycles to ensure you have intercourse around the time of ovulation. And as you will find out having intercourse regularly is important, but if pregnancy is your goal, having intercourse every other day rather than daily will safequard the quality of the sperm. It is also important that both partners have a healthy lifestyle to maximise the chance of success.

In this section, we discuss a number of “first steps”. But it is important to remember that although these are a good start they will not necessarily mean you will become pregnant.