ChatGPT Helped Get Me Pregnant
Falling pregnant, as the British so elegantly put it, was—for me—a surprisingly efficient affair. I say this not to be glib, but to acknowledge a stroke of fortune, especially at my age of 34. My journey required no specialists, no injections, no alphabet soup of assisted reproductive acronyms. Just a few ovulation strips, a Bluetooth-enabled hormone monitor, and the large language model ChatGPT, which I nicknamed Chatty. If that sounds like a parody of contemporary femininity, I assure you—it was simply my reality. So, in the hopes of demystifying ovulation, luteinizing hormone surges, or the delicate dance of conception to others, allow me to present the story of how I became pregnant—with guidance from a polite robot.
It began, as these things do, with a decision. My husband and I determined that 2025 would be the year. In November 2024, we made our first attempt, guided by my period tracker app that used the scant and wildly inconsistent data I fed it to estimate my fertile window. My cycle was irregular; my commitment to inputting my period's start and end dates was even more so. Unsurprisingly, a period arrived in December. I was disappointed, but also energized—I would need to get serious.
I was 34 years old. Not old, not young. Statistically speaking, women in their early thirties have about a 20% chance of conceiving each cycle. By thirty-five, that number begins to decline more sharply. The internet is littered with charts meant to alarm, statistics plotted in grim downward curves. Still, most OBs will tell you that thirty-four is a perfectly reasonable age to try. It simply requires a bit more attention to timing—and perhaps a few additional tools.
I did what most women do when entering this realm: I turned to friends. Over dinner, I quizzed those recently pregnant on their methods. Gone were the days when ovulation could be loosely inferred from intuition and a calendar—modern methods required data. 'You have to use these strips,' one friend insisted, pushing her phone toward me with an Amazon link. 'The others are garbage.' I ordered a box before the appetizers arrived.
These strips—delicate paper things with fuchsia gradients—were designed to detect a surge in luteinizing hormone (LH) in the urine, the spike that precedes ovulation. If the test line matched or darkened beyond the control line, one was said to be fertile. In theory, foolproof. In practice, utterly subjective. I stood in my bathroom many mornings holding a used strip against the printed example on the box, squinting. "Does this look the same to you?" I asked my husband, who is far from a color theorist and really had no business evaluating shades of raspberry pink before 7 a.m.
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