Pregnancy is counted from approximately 2 weeks before you actually conceive a baby. Sounds confusing, doesn’t it?
- The conception date is the day your baby was conceived, generally during the time you ovulate. Most women on a 28 day cycle ovulate 14 days from the first day of their period.
- Gestational age is the approximate conception date with two weeks added on. It’s counted from your LMP (last menstrual period), which is the first day you started bleeding.
Because most women know when their last period was, it’s easier for doctors to calculate from this date. Most women don’t know when they ovulated or the exact date they conceived, so doctors use the period as the date to calculate pregnancy from.
This also means that it’s close to impossible to find out that you’re pregnant before 3-4 weeks gestation. However it’s possible to find out you’re pregnant 1-2 weeks after conception.
Susannah is a certified Birth Doula through Childbirth International and the founder of Trimester Talk. With a background in journalism and digital strategy, she combines evidence-based research with real-world knowledge to create accessible content about pregnancy and parenting. She’s a mother of two and stepmother of two more, all of them now teenagers.
So that means i got pregnant on the 4 of September if that was my lmp
No, if your LMP was September 4th, your approximate conception date would be September 18th in a normal cycle.
sorry I hate to do this, but you used the wrong “their” up there. 😉 Also my bf was here only for a week and I ovulated June 2nd of that week. I had my LMP on May 22. I am so confused as to how I could’ve been pregnant before he was even here.