(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

This article is not the way to tell if you’re pregnant.

In fact, I strongly suspect that more people who read this article will NOT be pregnant than those who will be. You can certainly use this article to review some common symptoms of early pregnancy, but what it’s really here for is to talk you off the ledge if you’re driving yourself bonkers with lists of pregnancy symptoms or the feeling that every teeny different thing about your body today is a clear sign that you’re pregnant.

The internet is a fantastic place of infinite wonder, but when you’re freaking out thinking you might be pregnant, sometimes a lot of information is too much information, and the Internet is not our friend. People worried they’re pregnant can wind up freaked out by the ‘net the way people have freaked out over the Merck Manual in days of yore. We have one or two symptoms or changes in our bodies, and we flip through a bunch of medical pages only to feel we’ve discovered that the upset stomach we have today clearly is not nerves or a common flu bug, but some terrible, fatal disease and we’re in our final hours of life. Not likely, but it can be easy to feel that way, especially if you’re feeling terrified to begin with.

As well, online we can sometimes find anecdotal stories of every reliable birth control method under the sun failing, even in perfect use, even with more than one method used, even though we know, from long-term, reliable study, that while that does indeed happen to people every year, it is not nearly common as those stories can lead us to believe.

The vast, vast majority of the time, when people become pregnant, it is via vaginal intercourse and either because a reliable method of birth control was not used at all or was used inconsistently or improperly. Some of the people posting those stories may well be those who did have failures with perfect use, but most will be people who really didn’t, and are either not being truthful because they feel guilty, upset or ashamed about misuing a method (or not using any at all), or because they just didn’t understand what perfect use was for their method.

In other words: if you have been using one, or more than one, reliable method of birth control properly all of the times you needed one, pregnancy is unlikely. Even if you threw up this morning, or suddenly felt like a gumdrop and peanut butter sandwich sounded totally delicious.

So, what are the symptoms of early pregnancy?

Read on here!