You and your partner have tried for months, perhaps for even more than a year. But despite sexual intercourse without birth control, you've been unable to conceive a child.
If you've been trying to conceive for more than a year, there's a good chance that something may be interfering with your reproductive function. Infertility, also known as subfertility, is the inability to conceive a child within one year. Infertility may be due to a single cause in either you or your partner, or a combination of factors that may prevent a pregnancy from occurring or continuing.
Infertility differs from sterility. Being sterile means you're unable to conceive a child. With sterility, you or your partner has a physical problem that precludes the ability to conceive. A diagnosis of infertility simply means that becoming pregnant may be a challenge rather than an impossibility.
The human reproductive process is complex. To accomplish a pregnancy, the intricate processes of ovulation and fertilization need to work just right. For many couples attempting pregnancy, something goes wrong in one or both of these complex processes and causes infertility.
Infertility affects more than 6 million American couples, with the male partner being either the sole or a contributing cause in approximately 40 percent of infertile couples. Problems with female fertility are present about one-half to two-thirds of the time. In both men and women, multiple factors can account for difficulty with fertility.
