What Factors Affect Fertility According to Your Fertility?

Your Fertility (yourfertility.org.au) is a national public education program run by the Fertility Coalition and funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and the Victorian Government Department of Health. Its site groups the factors that affect your chance of pregnancy and a healthy baby into five areas: timing, age, drugs and chemicals, health and medical factors, and healthy eating and exercise. The program's own framing is that these are things you can understand and act on to improve your chance of conception — it is general education, not personal medical advice, so individual decisions belong with a clinician.

The Five Factor Areas on the Site

Timing: the fertile window

The site states plainly that the best time to conceive is during the "fertile window" of the menstrual cycle. Rather than a single day, this is a span of days each cycle when conception is most likely. Your Fertility provides an interactive ovulation calculator so you can estimate your own window from your cycle details. The practical takeaway: intercourse timed to the fertile window matters more than frequency at other points in the cycle.

Age

Age is presented as a core factor in fertility for both partners. The site treats it as context you should know before planning, not as a verdict — it sits alongside the other factors rather than replacing them.

Drugs and chemicals

This category includes smoking, and the site is explicit about the scale of misunderstanding around it. In a 2012 telephone survey of Australians aged 18 to 45 who want a child now or in the future, more than 40% were unaware that smoking and obesity significantly reduce fertility. Fertility Week 2022 focused specifically on what men and gender-diverse people can do to protect and improve fertility, with healthy sperm as the theme.

Health and medical factors

General health conditions and medical history fall here. The site offers a Healthy Conception Tool: you enter your details and it shows where you could make changes to improve your chances of pregnancy. A related Facebook live session with Dr Edwina Dorney for Women's Health Week 2022 walked through a pre-conception health check using that tool.

Healthy eating and exercise

Diet and physical activity are treated as modifiable factors in their own right, linked to the obesity point above. The site pairs this with general information on healthy eating and exercise rather than a prescriptive plan.

How to Use the Site's Tools

A sensible sequence if you are starting to plan: take the Fertility Quiz first to see where your knowledge gaps are, run the ovulation calculator to understand timing, then use the Healthy Conception Tool to identify lifestyle changes worth discussing with a health professional.

What the Site Does Not Cover

The page evidence describes an education program, not a clinical service. It does not present pricing, appointment booking, or treatment pathways, and nothing on the page indicates that tools or resources are gated behind payment or login — but absence of pricing information is not a statement that everything is free, so check each resource as you reach it. For diagnosis or treatment of a fertility problem, the site's role is to inform the conversation you have with your own doctor.

Bottom Line

If you want a plain-language, government-funded overview of what shapes fertility, Your Fertility organises it around timing, age, drugs and chemicals, health and medical factors, and lifestyle — and gives you three interactive tools to apply that to your own situation. The single most useful fact to carry away is the survey finding: a large share of people planning a pregnancy do not know that smoking and obesity significantly reduce fertility, which makes those two the first things worth reviewing.