I think a lot has changed since 30 years ago though. 30 years ago ovulation predictors didn’t exist, the home pregnancy test didn’t exist, if you thought you were pregnant you had to wait until your period was a month late and then you went to the gp and gave a sample and waited another 2 weeks for the result, by which time you were nearly 12 weeks and past the high risk period. Early miscarriage was probably as common then as it is now but most women didn’t know they were having a miscarriage, they would simply have a late heavy period, but is that really such a bad thing? Now we have tests that can tell us we’re pregnant within 14 days of ovulation, we can get a positive test and within a week could be bleeding and having a miscarriage, but now we have the knowledge that we’re having a miscarriage, and all the trauma that goes with it. Our parents were oblivious to these sort of things, they didn’t know, and therefore they didn’t go through the heartache and the trauma of losing a baby, because they didn’t know there was a baby to lose. Also, women didn’t generally leave it as late to start ttc, although women did have children later in life, most women got married and had babies at a younger age, because women who had children didn’t have careers.
I think also that things are different now because there is something that can be done. If a woman wasn’t ovulating 30 years ago, she would be told that she couldn’t have children, end of. Now with the advances in medical science, there are tests and procedures that can be carried out to ensure that women who previously would have been deemed to be infertile can now have the family they so desperately want.
I totally understand the need to predict fertile times if there is a problem with conception, i.e. a short luteal phase for instance, but how often do we read on here that “I must be pregnant because I know we did it at the right time”, and then AF appears anyway? I do think that for some it is necessary to know when they are ovulating, but conception is still such an unknown science, that even if you have sex at the very right time, conception is still not a certainty. In fact, more women now have problems with infertility than was the case 30 years ago, even with all the advances in prediction. Wonder why that is?
Initially my question wasn’t so much whether opk’s etc are useless, of course to some they are not, but more whether you were more likely to get pregnant if you predict your fertile time exactly than if you just had sex every ½ days around the middle of your cycle. And generally I meant for women who do not have any problems with fertility. Looking at the isisscope and persona forums, I genuinely don’t think that predicting is any more effective than just regular intercourse.