Firstly, if you and your partner are having concerns about your fertility, it is essential that you seek professional advice from your doctor or consultant. OK, that having been said, this part of site is dedicated to helping to answer some of your initial questions on fertility and infertility.

Understanding Fertility

Fertility in Women
In women, fertility means ability to become pregnant and have a baby. A woman's reproductive years begin when she starts her menstrual cycles during puberty (about age 13). The ability to have a child usually ends around age 45, though it's potentially possible for a woman to get pregnant until her periods end with menopause (about age 51).

When a baby girl is born, she already has in her body about 400,000 immature eggs (oocytes). These are stored in her ovaries in tiny fluid-filled sacs called follicles. Once she enters her reproductive years, she starts having monthly menstrual cycles. During each cycle, ovary releases one egg (or, less commonly, more than one), which may go on to join with a man's sperm cell and begin a pregnancy.

The development and release of egg depend on a delicate balance of hormones: chemicals that signal body's organs to do particular jobs. Some of these hormones are produced in ovaries. Others come from two glands in brain, hypothalamus and pituitary.

Fertility in Men
In men, fertility means ability to make a woman pregnant. To do this, man's reproductive system needs to produce and store sperm. It also needs to transport sperm outside of his body, so it can enter woman's reproductive tract.

The organs that produce sperm are called testes. Normally a man has two testes, located in scrotum, pouch of skin that hangs behind penis. Each one is called a testis (or sometimes a testicle). Inside each testis are many tiny organs called seminiferous tubules. This is where sperm develop.

Unlike a woman, who is born with all eggs she will have in her life, a man makes new sperm continually. Once a man passes through puberty, his stock of sperm is refreshed about every 72 days.

Infertility is diminished or absent capacity to produce offspring. The term does not imply complete inability to have children, and should not be confused with sterility. Clinicians have introduced temporal and physical elements to definition of infertility. Infertility is thus often diagnosed when 1 year of unprotected intercourse has passed without conception.

The Language of Fertility

• Fertilisation: contact between sperm and ovum, leading to their union.
• Conception: onset of pregnancy.
• Pregnancy: the condition of having a developing embryo or foetus in female reproductive tract after union of an ovum and sperm.