Hint: Sperm are sneakier than you’d think.
Raise your hand if you've ever asked the following question: Can you get pregnant without having sex?
Honestly, we all probably asked this question about a million times during our preteen or adolescent years.
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More specifically, can you get pregnant from activities other than unprotected p-in-the-v sex, like dry humping, oral, anal, or other sex play?
In case you missed sex education class, let's briefly go over how getting pregnant works. The most common way a person gets pregnant is through unprotected vaginal intercourse, when the penis ejaculates semen into the vagina.
The semen contains sperm, which travel up the vaginal canal, through the cervix, and into the uterus. If there's an egg present, then the sperm can fertilize it. Once the fertilized egg implants in the lining of the uterus, voilà — you're pregnant.
But the question remains: Could sperm still enter the vagina and cause a pregnancy without the whole penis-in-vagina sex preamble? And we aren't talking about insemination or IVF – we're focusing on the crazy mishaps and accidents that could maybe technically theoretically lead to pregnancy.
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"Unfortunately, there are a lot of crazy myths out there just to scare people, so it's important to understand the real scenarios where it's possible to get pregnant without having sex, and why," Dr. Mary Jane Minkin, clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine, tells BuzzFeed Health.
First, there are millions of sperm in just a tiny bit of ejaculate — we're talking 20 million sperm per 1 mL of semen, and the average male ejaculates 3.5 mL each time.
"It's important to talk about sperm first, because people might not know that there can be thousands or even millions of these little guys in just one drop of semen," Minkin says. So semen is pretty sperm-potent.
Just to give some context, Minkin says, a "low sperm count" is anything less than 20 million sperm per 1 mL of semen — and 10 or 15 million per 1 mL is still a lot of sperm. "So even a tiny bit of ejaculate can cause a pregnancy if it gets inside the vagina," Minkin says.
But what about the pre-ejaculate? "Research shows that there's very few, if any sperm in pre-ejaculate, but there's so little time between pre-ejaculate and ejaculate that they often mix and you can never be 100% sure it's only pre-ejaculate with no sperm," Minkin says. So it's better be safe than sorry, and assume there could always be sperm lurking in there.
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