late periods

Unless you've been charting your fertility (see our article Get with the Flow: All about FAM for more information), it's not really a good idea to think that there's any "safe" period in your cycle where you have less need to worry about pregnancy. Not everybody ovulates on Day 14. Especially in...

I know -- boy, do I! -- that there is an awful lot of propaganda out there that condoms aren't reliable, but that really is all that it is: propaganda. There are no microscopic holes in condoms, for instance, which semen or viruses can invisible escape through. When used properly, condoms are 98%...

Pre-ejaculate can contain sperm, and it's something that (especially during penetrative activities) usually goes unnoticed by both partners. The vagina is a wet environment, so you are not going to be able to feel the addition of some extra fluid. And (no matter what a partner may claim) men...

College is a big change in a person's life. It's a change that is far more stressful than many would even realize. When you leave for college, your living arrangements change, you're eating new food and you've got a hectic schedule to keep. All these stressors can cause your period to be late. If...

When you start taking the pill, you're adding lots of extra hormones into your system and they are essentially forcing your body into a new sort of cycle. It's not like the cycle you have when you aren't on the pill, because you no longer ovulate. Typically, you begin taking the pill around the time...

The notion that intercourse can somehow change the menstrual cycle -- unless a woman becomes pregnant or contracts certain infections -- doesn't have any factual cause or real basis. The menstrual cycle is a whole cycle, which occurs due to hormonal changes that intercourse, all by itself, can't...

It sounds like you've got your body pretty confused here! Let's talk a little bit about how the pill works, because that may clear things up a little bit. Birth control pills are essentially doses of synthetic hormones. What this does is sort of re-order the way your body is functioning with regard...

If the condom broke -- which is the only way semen would be coming out of the bottom of the condom -- then you were at a high risk of pregnancy. On the other hand, if your boyfriend seemed to think the condom looked intact, but just had fluids on the outside/bottom of it, he may have been mistaking...

Depending on when exactly you ovulate, that may not have been a safe time at all. Some people ovulate fairly early in their cycles, so for those people -- let's say someone who ovulates on day 10, and had unprotected sex on day 7 -- that would have been a very high risk time. Please understand that...