A Danish company is now producing a kit useful for those of us who are looking for a man to father our children or for those who want to avoid unwanted pregnancies. SwimCount is a home test that rates the potency of sperm in your lover’s semen. There are already products available to do that, you say. Not really. Existing products, such as SpermCheck, test the sperm count but don’t test their motile ability. To be effective, that is to get me pregnant sort of like salmon, sperm must swim upstream to reach my egg. With somewhere between 200 and 500 million sperms being injected into us with each male orgasm, you’d think getting pregnant would be trivial. But we women don’t make it easy for them. Our bodies protect us from weak and unsuitable sperms. Only the strong survive, so to speak. Our vaginas are acidic—except when ovulating—and kill most of them right off the bat, making impregnation virtually impossible most of the time. Vagina have a neutral PH during ovulation, allowing sperm to survive. Merely surviving doesn’t win a cigar. The sperm must swim through my vagina and into my cervix but, once there, they’re not home free. Cervical mucus that is supposed to help push sperm through the vagina, cervix and beyond while feeding it nutrients to give sperm the energy needed for the long journey to the egg sometimes kills the very thing it is supposed to assist.

Those sperm left surviving face another challenge in the cervix when they hit a fork in the road. Each leg of the fork leads to a fallopian tube, only one of which has a fertile egg in it at a time. Those taking the wrong tube fail in their mission. The few survivors compete for the honor of impregnating me. The first one to penetrate the mature egg wins and, voilà, I’m preggers.

Next time we talk about how to make sure our lovers aren’t shooting blanks or are when we want them to be.

I’m looking out for you single girls,

Tookie