How do you know if you are pregnant? Well, if you aren’t a woman, or you’ve had no contact with sperm, you probably can’t be pregnant. If you are, and you have, you might be pregnant. You could be pregnant before your first period. You could be pregnant while you are taking birth control pills. You could be pregnant even if you used a condom every single time you had sex and it never obviously broke. You could be pregnant even if you are perimenopausal. You can be pregnant even if you are having your period (especially if that period is unusually light or otherwise different from your usual bleeding). The simplest, cheap, private way to find out if you are pregnant is to get a home pregnancy test from a drugstore. You follow the directions, which are some variation on pee on this strip and then wait a minute and see if a line appears here and/or here. They are quite cheap. The directions will explain how far along you have to be before the test might work. They rely upon detecting a chemical (a hormone, HCG, human chorionic gonadotropin). Different women produce different levels of this hormone at different weeks of pregnancy. The accuracy of the test is how accurate it is at detecting the hormone if it is present, which it won’t be if you aren’t pregnant, and it still might not be if you haven’t been pregnant very long. Some pregnancies are associated with a very low level of HCG.
There are women who manage to go through pregnancy and not realize they are pregnant until they are about to give bith. Often, a medical professional told them they weren't or could never get pregnant (so don't just blame the women for being stupid). Quite often, these women were on birth control and had regular bleeding. Professionals often claim, well, it's not a period, it's implantation bleeding or whatever, and imply it only happens the first month or two, but it can happen throughout the pregnancy.
If you buy a home pregnancy test, buy a pack of three. If you think you are pregnant, and the test says you are not, the package insert may suggest you try another one, first pee in the morning, the next day. If it still says you aren’t, it’ll probably suggest try again in a week. In general, if you have any reason to suspect you are pregnant and that you would want to keep the baby, you should not assume you are not pregnant, just because the test was negative.
Copyright 2005 by Rebecca Allen
Created May 20, 2005 Updated May 23, 2005