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What Does It Do?

A Reproductive Primer

By Kelly Burgess

When Jan Mallak, a doula from Export, Pa., finishes with each mother/daughter class she gives for her local midwife center, she is amazed at the number of mothers who come up to her afterward and tell her how much they learned themselves. "Many women don't even understand how their own reproductive systems work, what ovulation is, the intricacies of reproduction and when you can and can't get pregnant," she says.

For all the sexual images we are bombarded with on a daily basis, males and females in our society are given very little concrete information on what we have and how it all works. Guys learn from girly magazines and each other. Girls don't even have magazines. It's a wonder we manage to reproduce at all.

Bonnie Matheson, founder of Childbirth Solutions, says that part of the reason we're so uninformed is that people don't learn about reproduction in the natural course of things anymore. "Except for people who live on farms, we don't know how nature works," she says. "The media makes everything seems so clean and sanitized, but in nature things are kind of messy and sloppy and wet."

Fluids do play an important role in reproduction, beginning with a girl's first period. According to Carol Weston, author of Girl Talk (Perennial Currents, 2004), this can come between the ages of 9 and 16, with 12 being most common. During that time, you were probably busy giggling your way through health class. Here's a few more things you may have missed:

Want to see more?

• At Your Cervix: A Lifetime of Cervical Health
• Yeast Infections: Treatment and Prevention of a Common Condition
• Women and Sexual Dysfunction: Coming to Terms With a Common Problem
• Talk about it!