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Mon 2 Aug, 2004 08:29 pm
May seem like a strange question but I've had one too many pregnant scares, I suppose I'm just trying to clarify things up if someone can help.
This is a question about the pill. After having taken your sugar pills and then taken on pill for the first of the month so your period has ended, can you have sex the next day (after taking the first pill) and be safe? Or do you have to wait until you've taken it a couple of times for it to become effective again? I went to the chemist, she said that it works immediately, I suppose I feel a bit funny about it as when you first begin to take the pill it doesn't become effect until about a week, a week and a half down the track. But after your period, after you haven't taken it for a week, it should be safe and sound after you've only taken it once.
Does that make sense? What do you think?
If your have a perfectly normal 28-day cycle and ovulation schedule you aren't fertile for about 12-14 days after you start to menstruate. And that's without being on the pill. You menstruate and about 2 weeks later you ovulate.
The only time you can get pregnant is when you're ovulating. It is a window of about 72 hours per cycle.
Sperm can live for some time inside you awaiting a viable egg, so the period of safe sex (in respect to pregnancy) becomes a little longer than those 72 hours - more like 6 days. So, that 2 weeks, 14 days, between the onset of your period and your ovulation, minus 7 days (to be extra safe) still leaves a week of safe sex even not on the pill. Often, women don't have perfect cycles, so this is not considered a good method of birth control (without the pill).
But, I believe the hormones in the pill make your body think it's pregnant, so that you don't actually ovulate anyway, therefore you can't become pregnant. Why you still are made to bleed, I'm not sure.
Ahhh littlek! You explain it! Thank you! *sigh* You go to doctors and they're like "No it's fine" but they don't explain WHY. Again. Thank you.
By the way it looks like people can ovulate more than once during a cycle -- it's not as predictable as once thought. (Translation -- the rhythm method is bunkety-bunk bunk.)
In terms of menstruation, I think how it works (man, I wrote a paper on this with graphs and everything, but I don't remember details) is that the pill makes your body think it's pregnant... UNTIL you stop. (The sugar pills, which are just so you stay in the "time to take a pill" groove, they don't serve any other purpose. I rarely take mine.) Then it's the sloughing off of the uterine lining, that had got all nice and plump and ready for the zygote to nestle in, that is menstruation.
Margie Profet has made a convincing (to me) case that menstruation serves an important purpose, ridding the uterus of pathogens, so I'm wary of this new wave of "only 4 times a year!" or whatever b.c. pills.
But that's a tangent.
Littlek already said this, but to summarize, if you're taking the pill when you're supposed to be taking it, you're fine, no matter where you are in the cycle.
If you have started taking the pill for the first time, it may take either a week or two for it to be effective. Once you have been taking the pill, there is little chance of getting pregnant (something like 0.1%) at any point of the month. Basically the pill prevents you from ovulating so you cannot become pregnant. As long as you have not missed any of the non-sugar pills during the month.
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