Are there any chances to get pregnant after menopause?

Menopause is a stage when there is no possibility left to conceive a child. It’s a fact that once a woman stops experiencing periods, she subsequently stops having the ability to get pregnant. However, these days we have been hearing news of 50+ women being able to give birth to their own grandchildren. How that has been possible? Medical science could possibly answer this question very well.

Heading towards the Menopause or the stage called ‘premenopausal’, many women experience irregular periods which doesn’t confirm that they can’t get pregnant. Even it doesn’t mean that their fertility ends here. When you face these irregularities in periods, you have not reached the final phase of menopause until you have experienced a year without periods. Once you have reached the final phase of Menopause, hormone level in your body will start changing. At this phase, LH and FSH levels remain high while estrogen and progesterone levels remain low and you won’t be able to ovulate anymore and cannot conceive. After menopause which is called ‘postmenopausal’, you experience hormonal level changes which are not suitable to release eggs anymore which means that you can no longer get pregnant naturally.

So how it has been possible to get pregnant after menopause?

Once you have already hit menopause but still would like to get pregnant, medical science have brought you the choice. You can still get pregnant going through a process called ‘IVF’ OR in vitro fertilization.

IVF is basically a process of connecting woman’s egg with a man’s sperm outside of woman’s body which means in the laboratory. There are five steps in IVF in case of women who are at child bearing age which are:

1. Stimulation
2. Egg Retrieval
3. Insemination and Fertilization
4. Embryo culture
5. Embryo Transfer.

In case of women who have already hit the menopause and cannot produce eggs anymore, the first two steps get omitted as they will have to use eggs from donors.

So in IVF, once the egg is fertilized after connecting it with man’s sperm (outside of woman’s body) and become an embryo, it is placed inside the womb of woman who can grow now and can turn into fetus and further.

IVF like all other pregnancies process, comes with some risks. These risks might be typical risks associated with pregnancy such as high blood pressure, preterm labor, preeclampsia, infections, etc. The risk of these complications is more in patient who conceive at an older age. It is suggestible to consult with your fertility doctor before going ahead with any treatment or process to understand risk associated with it and get the treatment accordingly.