hCG Levels: What Do They Tell Us, and Why Should We Care

If you are doing infertility treatments, chances are your doctor will have you test your human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone levels about 12 days after your procedure to determine if you are pregnant. hCG can be detected in one’s urine or blood, but a home pregnancy test will not show you the amount of this hormone, only whether you have enough of it to be considered pregnant. Knowing the actual level on a given date, however, is important if you want to be sure that the pregnancy is going well in its early stages.

IUI #3: Chemical Pregnancy

Even though my second intrauterine insemination (IUI) attempt did not make me a mother, it did prove that I was able to get pregnant and stay pregnant during the most critical months. To the reproductive endocrinologist who treated my infertility, this was encouraging; the aneuploidy was merely bad luck. Surely, my age had a lot to do with the unfortunate diagnosis, but since the chances of having another fetus with trisomy 13 were close to nil, I was eager to try to get pregnant again, hoping that the odds would now be in my favor.