When Can I Get Pregnant?

At the moment you were born, the Moon stood at a certain distance from the Sun. In the Panchang that distance is your janma tithi, the lunar day of your birth, and it is as personal as your moon sign. The Moon goes round the Sun's position once every 29.5 days, so the same distance, to the degree, comes back once a month.

The tradition behind this reading holds that a woman's fertility rises as the Moon comes back to her birth phase. The window opens three days before the exact return and closes at it, and the return itself is the peak. Nothing else in the chart moves these days: they come from the Sun and the Moon alone, which is why they repeat so regularly through the year.

Because the Moon covers about half a degree an hour, the birth time matters here. A time that is off by an hour shifts the fertile days by about an hour too. A rough time still gives the right days; it is the exact hours inside them that need an accurate time.

Since the Moon's month is 29.5 days and the calendar month is longer, your fertile days come about a day earlier each month. Over a year they fall twelve or thirteen times, and in some long months they fall twice — once at the start and again at the end. A conception calendar is simply this list of dates laid out ahead.

The calculator gives the next set only, and that is deliberate. One set of days, with its hours and its boy or girl lean, is something a couple can actually plan around. Once those days pass, opening the reading again gives the set after it.

The fertile days say when. Kshetra Sphuta says how strong the ground is. It is a single point in a woman's chart, found by adding the longitudes of the Moon, Mars and Jupiter, and the sign and navamsa chart position it lands in show her natural fertility. Kshetra means the field, and a field is feminine, so this point is happiest in even signs.

The sphuta never moves the fertile days. A woman with a weak sphuta has the same three days every month as anyone else; what changes is how much care the body needs around them. The man's side is read the same way from his Beeja Sphuta, explained with the rest of the promise of children on the page that answers when will I have a baby.

My own chart is a man's, and that is exactly why it makes a useful example here. The fertile days on this page are never read from a man's chart; they come from the woman's Moon phase alone. If a husband enters his own details hoping for the couple's dates, the reading asks for his wife's chart instead.

What my chart does carry is the other half of a couple's fertility. My Beeja Sphuta falls at 10°47'42" Libra. Libra is an odd sign, which suits the seed, but the point lands in a Capricorn navamsa, an even one. One of the two agrees, so it reads as moderate — sound, but not something to lean on alone.

When a couple consults me, this is the order I follow: her fertile days for the dates, her Kshetra Sphuta and his Beeja Sphuta for the strength, and the dasha in both charts for the year. If one sphuta is moderate, the stronger partner and good timing carry more of the weight, and neither number is a reason for worry on its own.