After looking it up online, the internet tells me that if we were to go ahead and get sperm delivered to our doorstep, we have about a 15% chance of success per try with at home insemination.
That doesn’t seem like that much. Jo and I only have a limited amount of money we can spend on all of this, so logically our next question is: how many times are we going to have to try this before we have a baby then?
There’s always a chance it happens on the first go, but what about average – how many times would we need to budget for?
Note – You can calculate this for yourself with any method as long as you know the success percentage for your age group. I hope I explained it well enough that you can do your own math, but if not you can always contact me for help and I would be happy to do it for you.
15% chance of success.
That does not really mean that by the second try we would have a 30% chance of being pregnant and by the third try a 45% chance, I get that much. But what does it mean?
In order to understand the chances of getting pregnant, we needed to know the ‘probability over time with separate events’.
I found it easiest to visualise it:
Looking at it like this shows that, while the chances of getting pregnant per try genuinely are 15%, the actual chances of success go down significantly over time – so much so that while on the second try it’s still 12.7%, by the sixth try it’s only 6.7%.
THIS is why it makes so much sense to switch methods after a while. (Ha! I actually get this now!)
So how many times would we need to budget for then?
If we count it all up then it says that after one try I would have a 15% chance of being pregnant, after two tries 27.7%, after three tries 38.5%. Four tries would give us 47.7%, five tries 55.5%, six tries 62.2%.
But we can’t actually afford to do that many.
Ordering sperm is very expensive, and all we could swing right now is two, maybe three tries at the most. Is it worth it then to spend everything we have on this?
After calculating it Jo and I come to the realisation that with blowing our entire budget, all we’d be buying ourselves is a one in three chance of a baby.
Ugh. That’s sobering.
If we had a pile of money lying around, I would definitely be in favour of giving this a couple of tries before doing anything else. It’s relatively easy, natural, and it seems the most pleasant to me by far to just do it at home. But even though we really like the idea, the truth is that we don’t have the money to spend months messing around with this method. Not when it has such low results. The chances that we’d end up with no baby and an empty wallet just seem too high.
Back to the drawing board we go…
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