Yup. It’s more likely if the woman has irregular or short menstrual cycles.
My post is my cite. 
That’s what I remember the book saying, at least, but it’s possible that I got it really wrong. I remember something about 2 months out of the year being more fertile than the rest, but I think this was written in the interest of making babies rather than preventing them. One thing I do remember, and wrote down, is that the actual percentage chance of getting pregnant even during fertile times is astonishingly low. Something like 9% on some days, 1% on others.
I don’t know the answer to your question (I think there are probably as many women who are ashamed of their bodily functions as there are men who are squicked out by it), but I’ve always found this fear of menstruation to be really strange. My husband is a nut. I usually use cloth (and oh how he loves that), but even if I use disposable pads, he freaks out if I leave them in sight in the bathroom…unused, in the package. He’s scared we’ll have a guest and they’ll see. Oh the shock! The horror!! It especially bothers him if there might be children exposed to this gruesome sight! Let me tell you, he was not happy when my son (a baby) sat on the floor tossing tampons (again, new in the packages) around, putting them in and out of the box. I can pretty much guarantee that when I have my period, I’ll get a lot of bedtime reading in.
Ha! 
I honestly don’t know why it squiks me out so bad, but it does.
“AHHHhh! The Device!” - my husband on seeing my (clean) DivaCup on top of my vanity.
One more vote for ewww.
IME the strongest negative reaction tends to come from whoever has to wash the sheets.
I am not particularly squicked out by my menstrual fluids (I even use the o.b. tampons without separate applicator), but that doesn’t mean I want to have them all over everything.
I wonder if people would still be squicked out if they realize that for some women, their period is a time of increased desire and responsiveness. My ex—a very sexually adventurous man—used to love my periods because all it took was a couple of towels and we could do it for hours. It also made cramps disappear, too. Tea and sex, that’s what I reccomend for getting rid of cramps and bloating.
To these women:
An integral part of being “ready to be a mother” involves finding a willing partner- not just one who is willing to have sex, but one who is willing to provide support for your child. If you can’t do that, there are sperm banks where you can become a mother without coercing an unwilling partner into supporting your decision. If you can’t support a child without coercing someone into helping you- well, you’ll want to work on that before you have the child. Being financially ready is as important as being emotionally ready when it comes to being ready to be a parent.
I sympathize with the women in bad financial situations who accidentally become pregnant and have to get child support from someone, or whose financial situations unexpectedly deteriorate. I have very little sympathy for people who deliberately try to get pregnant when they know they are in no shape to have a child, either emotionally or financially.
Ma Nature has Her own agenda. Yours is of no consequence.
Anal sex while using a tampon is similarly effective and significantly less messy. Yes, okay, I realize how illogical it is on some level for guys to be grossed out by the thought of vaginal sex during menstruation while being okay with anal sex, but sex is not really logical, is it?
Except his “protected manhood” would have been a risk as well, correct? I can point to a (beautiful, perfect, better than yours) nine month old example of the unreliability of birth control.
-Joe
I think that factoid is actually from “All You Ever Wanted To Know About Breeding Hippopotami”.
Could it have said 2 days out of the month? That is closer to the truth. The 2 days before ovulation are the most fertile. The average chance of pregnancy while actively trying is about 25% each month. (Why yes, I recently have done a lot of reading about this!)
If a woman has regular 28 day cycles the chances of conceiving during menstruation are very low. The issue is that even regular women have an occasional wonky cycle, due to stress or illness or whatever, and you don’t know when that will be. So the chance is always there, but then again the condom could break too.
Here’s one about breastfeeding I did not know until I had my last child: when I was breastfeeding my Dr. did indeed inform me that I was less likely to get pregnant, but that it was not impossible and I should be on the pill. They put me on a kind of mini-pill, because sometimes taking the regular pill can interfere with milk supply. Later I read that unless I was exclusively breast feeding, the mini-pill may not be enough to prevent pregnancy on it’s own. I would have assumed that even if I stopped breastfeeding, I was on the pill and therefore ok, but after I stopped I had to switch to a different pill.
That’s important to know as many women only breastfeed part time and supplement with formula. I think that’s how many women get pregnant while breastfeeding anyway…they hear that you are unlikely to get pregnant while breastfeeding, but breastfeeding an infant around the clock and breastfeeding a toddler twice a day are very different.
I really think that many of these kinds of ideas are just ignorance. Even in sex ed classes they don’t usually go over the complicated facets of reproduction, just things like “use birth control”. I know many women that had no idea of fertile vs. non fertile days during a cycle until they either got pregnant or tried to conceive.
Hang around a TTC message board for a while and you will see all kinds of crazy questions and myths come up, I am convinced that many people really don’t know this stuff.
The only other person who’s admitted to using cloth (to me, anyway) is my grandmother, and she was born in 1896. Not that it’s any of my business, but why would you use cloth?
Well, it’s cheaper (one-time purchase if you buy them, much less if you make them yourself). It’s more comfortable - very soft, organic cotton up against the skin and girly bits is very nice. Supposedly, your periods are shorter and lighter with cloth usage, but I haven’t found that to be the case for me. I cloth diaper (and use cloth wipes), so I already have a washing routine going (and, no, I don’t wash them with the diapers). It’s less trash to send to the landfill. We limit all of our disposable product usage (we use cloth grocery bags, rags for cleaning, etc.). We have not converted to cloth for toilet paper, so it’s still safe to visit our house! There is actually quite a large selection of cloth pads available on the internet, some of them in really cute fabrics.
Apologies to any men who are needing a little lie down right now.
I don’t think the women in the OP are more ignorant than most. I racked up a third level rating on Yahoo answers in less than two weeks answering the same question over and over again by different askers: Could I be pregnant? Could I have gotten her pregnant? Could I be pregnant if we only had unprotected sex during my period while the moon was in Virgo? Answer: Yes, yes, yes, yes, a thousand times YES!!!
Go look in the “Things I didn’t know until an embarrassingly old age” thread and count how many Dopers - people I think we all generally agree tend to the higher intelligence AND education end of the spectrum than the population at large - didn’t know a woman has three orifices below the belt until they were in adulthood. You expect them to know the facts about lactational amenorrhea? WTF?
And, I must point out, YOU’RE WRONG, in fact. As I pointed out recently in another thread, breastfeeding is actually an excellent method of contraception, IF you’re breastfeeding exclusively, waking at least twice during the night to nurse, nursing totally on demand, your infant is less than 6 months old, you haven’t gotten a period and you are not overweight. If all these are true, lactation for contraception has a failure rate of less than 2%, same as hormonal birth control. cite.
So do I get to call you a stupid liar now, or should I just assume you didn’t know this because no one’s told it to you before? Maybe I should cut you a little slack and try to make sure that as many people know as possible by repeating it, over and over, to anyone who comes to me with a question, and by trying to correct people who post erroneous information. Maybe I should post my 843rd link to Taking Charge of Your Fertility and encourage you to buy three copies - one to read and two to give away to young men and women in your life, so that we don’t keep on being ignorant about the way half the bodies in our population work.
It is my understanding that breastfeeding does not stop ovulation unless you are a woman with insanely low body fat. Unless you are a Masai living in Africa, it’s a myth.
Plenty of babies born 13 months apart to prove it!
ETA- I read your cite, but I would need more before I believed it. My OB/GYN did not believe it, either.
OK, I asked my doctor this very question and was assured that the mini-pill is adequate protection for the mother breastfeeding a toddler. I asked her directly. So then I asked her why isn’t this prescribed for EVERYONE, and she says, oh it’s only ?estogten ?protesterone … I dont’ remember. One only, not both, like regular pills. This was a non-answer! What, two are better, but one is adequate, so why two? She never answered
So there’s half the problem you ASK a medical professional and they don’t even explain it. And what was explained contradicts what you say, Velma.