For many women and entire families, the news of a pregnancy is always one of the highlights of their life. It gets them into a frenzy of getting to establish just when they expect to have their bundle of joy in their arms. Calculating when the pregnancy is due can be a tricky process especially where the need to be precise appears to be an overriding concern. However, one can ensure that they get as close to this date as possible by following a series of procedures. These revolve around making estimations based on either the date of the last menstrual period or the occurrence of the last ovulation.
Using the Menstrual Period as a Reference
Prediction of the pregnancy date on the basis of the time or more specifically, the date when conception is said to have occurred has been hailed as being one of the most reliable approaches. This approach involves calculating the period the pregnancy is expected to last with the date when one had their last menstrual period as a point of
reference. Among the assumptions that are taken into account when using this approach is that conception is deemed to occur on the fourteenth day in the menstrual cycle. Such a cycle should be done to cover a twenty eight day period which is the average duration upon which most of the women base their cycles. The calculation involves the addition of two extra weeks to the pregnancy date in order to give a forty week pregnancy. This should take up to two hundred and eighty days.
Using Ovulation as a Reference
Another procedure that one can use to calculate the pregnancy date is by pegging the due date on the date when ovulation last took place. This procedure aims to overcome the errors that one could encounter in the previous method which could be defective. This is done on the basis of ovulation varying in timing compared to the date when menstruation occurred in different cases. As such the ovulation approach requires that women establish the possible date when this process could have occurred. Calculating the date when ovulation is suspected to have occurred can be done courtesy of two approaches. The first one is use of the ovulation predictor kit abbreviated as OPK. The same date can also be established using a basal body temperature chart.
If one uses the last menstrual period approach and they have doubts regarding its reliability, they should resort to either of the two ovulation date based approaches. Even they should allow some room for errors hence settle on a number of options, as any of them could be the due date.