Science of Fertility

The life of a new organism of the human species starts at the moment of fertilization. This is when the sperm and oocyte plasma membranes fuse. The ovarian continuum begins at fertilization, when the zygote starts its development.

Until now, a biological dogma has been that all sex differences in the brain arise from differences in the gonadal secretions. It has recently been demonstrated that the whole genome of males and females seems to be different; not only are the sexual chromosomes different, but also autosomes have a major role in sexual differentiation. For our purposes this will be very important to keep in mind, because during this lecture I would like to invite you to look at ourselves the way we were created. I would also like to invite you to look at the many instances by which this creation can be distorted.

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?

This study to investigate whether the Billings Ovulation Method® is efficacious in assisting couples to achieve pregnancy was conducted by Research Team of Ovulation Method Research and Reference Centre of Australia Ltd. It included all couples aiming to achieve a pregnancy who enrolled at any one of 17 Australian Billings Ovulation Method® clinics within the required time frame – 1/1/1999 – 31/12/2003. All couples were included regardless of age, cycle length, or pre-diagnosed sub-fertile indicators of either partner.