How to Stop the Use of Birth Control to Become Pregnant

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Joshua Vogel with Carolina OB/GYN, a division of Woman's and Health Associates. I'd like to talk to you today about how to stop birth control in order to become pregnant. This is obviously a subject that comes up quite a lot. Most people, when they ask this question, are talking about birth control pills, and the primary issue is one of potential delay in resuming your ovulation after stopping birth control pills. The problem in answering the question is that there is a lot of variability. It can range anywhere from one month to three months to six to twelve months, and there's no way to know in advance how long an individual is going to be. So, my advice is don't stop the birth control pills until you're ready to become pregnant. But, if it's going to be okay for you to be pregnant a little sooner than you anticipated but very frustrating for you if it ends up taking a lot longer then you should probably go ahead and start stop sooner rather than later. Other kinds of commonly used birth control pills include the NuvaRing for which the answer is the same as the birth control pills, or IUD for which the answer is you are ready to become pregnant essentially immediately after removal of the IUD. So, if you've been using an IUD don't remove it until you're ready to become pregnant. Expect to likely become pregnant shortly after removal. This has been a discussion today of how to stop your birth control when trying to conceive."