The title of this presentation contains two words which we must discuss a little, namely Fertility and Awareness. In the present context the word Fertility means the capacity to produce offspring. This capacity is, as we know, different for women and men. In a broad sense women have a cyclically varying fertility from puberty to menopause, while men are fertile from puberty onwards for the rest of their lives. The Fertility which is the subject for this presentation is mainly the normal cyclically varying capacity to conceive in women. To be fertile a woman has to have a mature egg cell available for conception and implantation, and hopefully carry the offspring until delivery. The other word, Awareness, means that a woman can know when she possesses this capacity. Human beings have existed for a long time, andwe may speculate that perhaps people have once had some natural feelings about the fertile periods in women. We know nothing about this in prehistoric and early historical time, and when people started to write in early times, this was probably restrictedto men only. Who has heard about a woman Hippocrata or a woman Aristotela?
