Can a woman be pregnant if she gets her period? – Dr. Suhasini Inamdar

A woman cannot be pregnant if she gets her periods. So to understand this let us understand how the menstruation or the periods happens. A lady secretes egg every month and this leads to get fertilized to form an embryo and this is how she becomes pregnant. If she doesn’t become pregnant, the egg gets autolysed and she will end up with a menstruation. If a lady is pregnant, she can have bleeding, not very cyclically, but now and then which can mimic periods. So the lady has to be very careful if the periods is not like a regular periods. If the condition where she is pregnant and can bleed are like an implantation bleed, if she is just pregnant and she has a small bout of bleeding. She thinks it is periods but it is not. It is just the bleeding that is happening because the embryo is going and sitting inside the uterus. The second condition may be a threatened abortion where she may need some help from the doctor as in taking tablets for progesterone, injections of Human chorionic gonadotropin, which we call as HCG and with that it should be alright. Third condition can be a very very early miscarriage and she confuses this with the periods. Another condition is the double or a bicornuate uterus, in which condition, the pregnancy is there in the horn of the uterus and the other horn is empty. Now and then the thickened endometrium sheds and mimics periods, but again the bleeding might not be as heavy as the periods bleeding and sometimes because of the polyps on the cervix and the vagina may lead to bleeding and the lady may not be aware of them and the complications of this polyps and may think of this as the menstrual bleed.