Читать книгу Sex For Dummies - Pierre Lehu A., Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer - Страница 15

Female humans differ from nearly all the rest of their sex in the animal kingdom because, rather than wanting sexual intercourse only when they can conceive (that is, when they’re in heat), women can want sexual intercourse at any time (provided they don’t have a headache). Despite this difference, female humans do share with other female mammals the trait that enables them to make a baby, or conceive, only at certain times — in most women’s cases, from one to three days a month.

Just because a woman is fertile only a few days a month, don’t assume that those are the only days that unprotected sexual intercourse can make her pregnant. A woman’s reproductive organs are much more complicated than that, as I explain in Chapter 3.

Unlike a man, who continually makes sperm (more than 26 trillion a year!), a woman has all her eggs already inside her at birth. These eggs — about 200,000 of them — reside in a woman’s two ovaries (see Figure 1-1). About every 28 days, a fluid-filled sac in the ovary, called a follicle, releases one of the eggs. When a follicle releases an egg, many women feel a dull ache, known as mittelschmerz, in the area around the ovary.

Illustration by Kathryn Born

FIGURE 1-1: The egg begins an incredible journey in search of a sperm to produce a child. No wonder sex has been called “making whoopee”!

Becoming aware of when mittelschmerz occurs is a good point of reference for anyone practicing natural family planning. I talk more about family planning in Chapter 7.