Alcohol and Pregnancy

If you are trying to get pregnant, can your drinking habits affect your fertility? If you want to conceive, you might need to take a hard look at how much alcohol you have been drinking. After all, drinking alcohol can have adverse effects on your fertility and your overall ability to conceive. In addition, once you are pregnant, drinking alcohol can affect the development of your baby so analyzing your drinking habits now can have both short- and long-term benefits for you and your child.

Chronic alcoholism can definitely affect your child while developing in the womb, but how does it affect your child and fertility before you conceive? Most doctors will ask you how much you drink when you are attempting to have a baby. If you engage in more than light consumption of alcoholic drinks each day, your fertility could suffer. Light alcoholic consumption is typically described as a daily consumption of one or two drinks per day. If you drink more than eight drinks every day, you would be suffering from alcoholism.

What are some of the specific adverse reactions to alcohol intake? You can suffer both from infertility as well as an increased risk for a spontaneous abortion and impaired growth of the fetus and its development. You can have problems getting pregnant and then if you are pregnant, might see a miscarriage, pre-term birth, stillbirth or other serious implications. Alcohol abuse will also affect your body by causing amenorrhea, which is a total absence of menses or anovulation, which is a lack of ovulation. Any time you mess with your ovulation cycle, you will definitely decrease your chances of getting pregnant in an easy and natural way. Knowing that alcohol abuse is a cause of these problems can help you work with your own natural conception goals.

What about the male partners? Can alcohol consumption affect your partner’s fertility with excessive alcohol consumption? In general, men can see a rise in estrogen levels, which will impact their fertility. The increased levels of estrogen will interfere with sperm development overall, as well as imbalanced hormone levels. In addition, alcohol can kill off sperm-generating cells in the testicles which will decrease production of the sperm overall. Sperm can take at least three months to develop so if you have not drank in 3 – 4 months, you can check your sperm count again with presumably better results.

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