Tips For Getting Pregnant after a Miscarriage

After miscarriage many couples want to get pregnant again, soon. It’s important that you understand your body, your emotions, and the fact that it is unlikely your health or your health behaviors caused the miscarriage.

1. Whatever the cause research says it’s unlikely that the medical issue will recur and you should just try again for pregnancy.

2. Waiting too long to try again may not be helpful. In fact waiting over 3 months can increase the chance of adverse outcome in the next pregnancy. In fact waiting over 12 months increases the risk of having trouble getting pregnant again according to the Concepcion After Pregnancy Loss article in Feb 2016 issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

3. Even young women can have chromosomal abnormal eggs. About half of all the miscarriages are due to chromosome problems in that egg alone and thus will not be repeated. In the newest studies it shows that chromosomal problems account for a bit less than 50% of all spontaneous abortions, also known as miscarriages.

4. The health of your uterus is important, and this can be checked if your gyno thinks this was an issue. The next most common reason for a miscarriage is that the implantation location in the uterus was poor, but it might have only been poor in that one cycle.

5. Healthy lives make for healthy babies. Other correctable reasons for miscarriage are smoking, extremely thin or being obese, consuming too much alcohol, having used medication that could cause a miscarriage or being in a prior accident. The final question then becomes: how soon can a couple safely try for another pregnancy after an early miscarriage?

6. A miscarriage will not make you infertile or change ovulation.

7. If you don’t want to be pregnant, take steps to prevent it. After you miscarry you can ovulate as soon as 2 weeks. So the decision to contracept for a bit or to begin trying again if you were trying for pregnancy is an important one.

8. The WHO has recommended waiting 6 months. Other organizations have focused on birth spacing mostly after full term births or after births in third world countries. The WHO information was based on one study that was done in Latin America. Now there was a new study out of Scotland looking at over 30,000 women with their first miscarriage, during the second pregnancy over a twenty year period of time.

9. Your chances of getting pregnant after a miscarriage is thus good. In the study mentioned above over 40% got pregnant within those first 6 months and actually getting pregnant within those first 6 months was better than waiting longer in terms of healthy pregnancy outcomes.

10. A new article in the NY Times also talk about the fact that women trying quickly got pregnant more easily. So we are telling women they need not delay as long. Now if you became very anemic, or have other medical conditions to correct, or have emotional reasons you need to slow down, those are reasons to sit and gab with your gyno and figure out how long, what nutritional changes, and what other medical tests to do before launching out on your own.

11. COVID? Zika? Travel? All good things to consider before getting pregnant and planning how long you will breastfeed. And if you didn’t have a pre-pregnancy planning visit with your gyno, even if you are healthy, you may want to schedule that visit. At Women’s Health Practice we also offer genetic testing for couples with problems of miscarriage, infertility or a history of birth defects. And after pregnancy is achieved again there are now arrays of tests that can test for the genetic health of the baby. Once you do get pregnant again, if you are 35 years old, or younger, and there is a fetus with a heart beat seen on ultrasound, the risk of miscarriage will be less than 5%.