Home pregnancy tests

Ok, be honest - how many did you do?  Finding out you are pregnant when you've been trying for a long time tends to be so unbelievable that many of us don't believe it.  The first reaction to a positive test is often an assumption that there must be something wrong with the testing kit and a trip to the shops to buy another, and then perhaps just one more to check.

In fact, home pregnancy testing kits are incredibly accurate.  It's possible to get a false negative which suggests you aren't pregnant if you test very early when your levels of the pregnancy hormone are still quite low, but otherwise a home test is unlikely to be wrong.  A false positive - a test result which says you're pregnant when in fact you aren't - is highly unlikely.  The only time you can get a positive result when you aren't pregnant is if you've been prescribed HCG injections instead of progesterone as part of fertility treatment.  This is not common, and your clinic would have told you and should have explained that it would make a urine test for pregnancy unreliable.

So, if you're sitting looking at a positive test and wondering whether it can possibly be accurate - the answer is yes, it can - yes, you are pregnancy - and, congratulations!