Silly question that any kid who has taken sex ed can answer.....

[its_our_family]

How long does sperm live....inside the female body?

I'm on cd12 and I think I should be o-ing any time....usually by day 14....will the sperm live that long?

[its_our_family]

Oops....I just looked....I'm on cd 14.....my temp also spiked an entire degree....what does that mean? (it was 96.7 yesterday and 97.7 today...)

(man I need to borrow a copy of tcoyf!)

[frogertgrl]

Megan, I do not believe sperm life inside the female body is part of the accepted curriculum of US Sex Education.

Do you have Take Charge of Your Fertility? It would explain everything.

One factor in sperm living is the quality of female CM. In a hostile CM environment, sperm dies within hours. In fertile quality CM, sperm can survive up to five days. Every woman is different and would need to chart their CM to see if it's fertile quality or not, to be able to access likelihood of conception based on sperm survival.

The best chances for conception (if there are no infertility factors or history of pregnancy problems) occur on -4,-2,0,+2,+4 as related to ovulation.

HTH!

www.tcoyf.com

That site will be able to answer the vast majority of your questions. Their tutorial on the female cycle is amazing.

[frogertgrl]

As far as temps, for ovulation to be detected using temps, you need to have a thermal shift. One day of increased temp doesn't mean you've had a thermal shift. You need to have three consecutive days of temps higher than the highest temps of the previous six days.

[its_our_family]

Thanks!

I don't have a copy of tcoyf.....In all honesty...I have a hard time comprehending things that I read lately. I'll go to the site and read up. I read it before but I guess I didn't understand it as well as I thought I did.

It'll live 5 days.....hmmmm.....in a perfect environment.....well its not perf4ect...but pretty close!

You know the weird thing....I was afraid I would stress over this charting stuff....but I'm really not. I find it more interesting than stressful! I think it helps cause we aren't ttc.....so I'm in no hurry to get everything figured out...its awesome how the human body works though!

about sex ed...I thought we learned sperm life...but I guess i was wrong!

[Jane]

We learned about sperm life, but only in that really scary, THEY LIVE FOREVERRRRRR! kinda way that is meant to scare teenagers out of having sex. No actual information exhange involved. LOL.

[OnTheFence]

Maybe instead of lurking I will come out and play.

Sperm in the right conditions can live up to seven days. There was an article published in the early nineties called Sperm Wars in Scientific America about all the ins and outs of sperm. I will share some of that info here.

In fertile quality cervical fluid sperm can live up to seven days from a health young male, however you should only count on it living four to five days if you are trying to do natural sex selection for a girl. Male sperm swim faster but die quicker. The life span is 48 hours or less. Female sperm may live the longest but the swim the slowest. They also seem to get trapped more traveling through the cervix up to the uterus. More male sperms are deformed, the reason that birth defects are higher in male babies than female, have a higher incidence of being miscarried, and dying at birth. As a man ages the shorter life his sperm has. A man in his late thirties and forties may have sperm that live up to 3 days. In hostile non fertile enviroments sperm die off much quicker, some dying off in hours.