Harold B. Lee Library

Conception and Fertility

Sometimes it seems that ease pregnancy and desire for children have an inverse relationship. People who barely thought of children at all are pregnant faster than they can snap their fingers. Others who long for children go through years of trial and error and experience hardships like miscarriage and infertility.

Many will take even the strangest advice if it means they’ll finally get pregnant. Then, there comes the beginnings of a new life, when the couple is baffled, not sure what exactly what is going on and if their dreams have finally come true come true.

Everything You Should Know About Pregnancy??? (FA 01 456)

Fertility isn’t something that people knew much about, so sometimes they thought that food or other activities would greatly affect it. Whipping cream was meant to make men more fertile, so depending on how a woman felt about children, she could change her husband’s dessert. However, most beliefs on the matter were quite serious in nature.

One especially prevalent belief is that adopting will increase chances of pregnancy. A couple needs only to file for adoption to become pregnant, so a few couples filed without the intent of actually adopting. They were pleased that they got pregnant afterwards.

One woman was told to hold her legs up all night to become pregnant, which she tried, but she wasn’t successful. Her difficulties may have come from vague wording disguising the actual intent of the advice because another woman actually tried having intercourse while keeping her legs up, and she got pregnant.

Couples who really want to get pregnant should abstain from intercourse for a few months before they attempt to conceive to ‘increase the supply.’ After the first pregnancy, people usually don’t have trouble with fertility again.

The moment of conception is magical, and some people claim that they can feel a tingle the moment that the egg and sperm meet.

The first moment a baby’s movement is discernible to its mother feels like a gas bubble or a burp, but can be described as a brand new butterfly emerging from its chrysalis and flapping its wings gently. Most people describe it as gas though.

Some women have an allergic reaction to being pregnant, and get little red clots on their wrists. Another woman gets swollen gums. Despite this, some claim that women who are pregnant are beautiful and glowing. No matter what they actually look like, they are beautiful and glowing.

When babies develop fingernails, some mothers can feel them scratching at their insides. It is not a pleasant feeling.

One woman believes that she felt the first signs of live exactly 4 ½ months through the pregnancy. This was helpful as she was unable to pinpoint a conception date for her doctor, so they didn’t know when to make a due date. They predicted the due date based on the first feeling of life, and were accurate as to the child’s birthday.

Babies are born at the same time of day as they are conceived.

Folklore of Pregnancy and Birth (FA 01 510)

Twins are a really strange phenomenon that pepper some family trees and completely avoid others. How can such a thing be explained? Instead of one baby, two brand new human beings are brought into the world. Some say that twins occur when a couple has intercourse more than once a night. Others claim that twins happen every third generation. Neither of these suppositions is remotely true, but sometimes it brings comfort to impose order into the world.

Wives’ Tales About Pregnancy (FA 01 910)

If a couple is having trouble getting pregnant, the man should take a cold shower before intercourse. There is a lot of support for men taking cold showers in general, and apparently there are lots of health benefits to doing so.

On the women’s side of things, gagging on a toothbrush during a normal teeth brushing regime is occasionally considered a good indication of pregnancy.