Women, who have usually been playing with dolls as long as they can remember, expect to get pregnant easily. Female infertility is the last thing they worry about. Even when they have delayed having children in order to go to school or further their careers. When the time is right in a woman's life, we expect to be able to conceive. The common belief is that female infertility does not happen to healthy and vibrant women.

The truth is that female infertility can happen to anyone at any time. Even women who have previously had children can experience female infertility.

When a couple has been trying to conceive for more than a year without any kind of protection (or for six month's if the woman is over 35), there may be a female infertility problem. If your doctor suspects this is the case, she may order a semen test. This is a very simple and non-invasive male fertility test. If the test comes back normal, then your doctor will begin to determine if there is a female infertility problem.

Some of the signs that may point to a female infertility problem are:

Irregular Menstrual Cycle
Even though few women have a textbook-like 28-day cycle; many have their period only once a couple of months. Any cycle less than 24 days or more than 35 days is considered irregular and can lead to a meeting with a reproductive endocrinologist. If you have irregular periods and have not been able to conceive you may want to keep a diary of your cycle. Within many irregular cycles there may be regularities that can be found once you begin to really pay attention. After a few months of writing everything down, you may begin to see a pattern. This pattern may help you plan better and eliminate the female fertility problem.

Irregular Ovulation
One assumes that if the menstrual cycle is regular, she must be ovulating, but this is incorrect as not all women ovulate every cycle. Since there is usually a 24 hour window where she is most fertile, calculating if and when she ovulates is crucial to eliminate female infertility. Again, another step you can take even before you visit an infertility specialist, is try to pint-point your ovulation. There are many over-the-counter ovulation test kits that can help you with this. Once you determine if and when you are ovulating, you can plan better and remove your female infertility problem.

Family History
It is important to find out if your mom had trouble conceiving you and if your husband’s sister had to go through infertility treatments before she had her first child . If any of these scenarios is true, you have a higher probability of having to go through the female infertility screening questions.

Age
Women 35 and older are not automatically female infertility candidates. A forty year old could have no problem conceiving. It is just that the number of eggs a woman produces each cycle diminishes in her mid-thirties and therefore the chances of getting pregnant become less in comparison to someone in their early twenties with all other factors being constant.

Most female infertility problems can be corrected. Science has progressed leaps and bounds and more miracle babies are being born everyday.