You can get pregnant without having sexual intercourse. While ideally, semen should be deposited as close to the cervix as possible to get pregnant as it would be after vaginal intercourse , you can conceive as long as semen gets anywhere near the vagina or vaginal opening. This may occur if a man ejaculates outside the vagina, or it can occur if semen gets on someone's fingers and those fingers are placed near or inside the vagina. Pregnancy may also occur without ejaculation if the erect penis comes into contact with the vaginal area. A small amount of semen—just a drop or two—is excreted when a man gets an erection. Note that you can't get pregnant from a toilet seat, swimming in a public pool, using a hot tub, or bathing in any other body of water.
How you can get pregnant—accidentally or intentionally—without having sex
Getting pregnant
Back to Pregnancy. Yes, although the risk of getting pregnant in this way is very low. If you want to avoid getting pregnant, you should use contraception. A man's semen the liquid produced when he ejaculates or "comes" contains millions of sperm. One ejaculation can contain more than million sperm. As soon as the penis is erect, before the man ejaculates, a liquid called pre-ejaculate is produced. This liquid can contain thousands of sperm. Men have no control over the production of this liquid. The egg can be fertilised by sperm contained in semen or pre-ejaculate.
What if I didn’t have sex?
According to the American Pregnancy Association, while it is "extremely unlikely" for a woman to get pregnant without penetration, it is "technically possible. Pregnancy naturally occurs when sperm cells from a man's semen enter a woman's vagina and then travel through her cervix and uterus to the fallopian tubes, where an egg is fertilized. The average male's ejaculate typically contains anywhere from around 40 up to 80 million sperm cells and only one sperm cell needs to fertilize an egg. All said, while rare and very unlikely, if any of your partner's sperm gets into your vagina, you can still technically get pregnant. Additionally, it's still up in the air whether pre-ejaculate the liquid produced before ejaculation can cause pregnancy. The risk of getting pregnant without penetration is extremely low. If you want to avoid getting pregnant, it's important to find a method of birth control. There are many options available to you.
Hint: Sperm are sneakier than you'd think. Honestly, we all probably asked this question about a million times during our preteen or adolescent years. In case you missed sex education class, let's briefly go over how getting pregnant works. The most common way a person gets pregnant is through unprotected vaginal intercourse, when the penis ejaculates semen into the vagina. The semen contains sperm, which travel up the vaginal canal, through the cervix, and into the uterus. If there's an egg present, then the sperm can fertilize it. But the question remains: Could sperm still enter the vagina and cause a pregnancy without the whole penis-in-vagina sex preamble? And we aren't talking about insemination or IVF — we're focusing on the crazy mishaps and accidents that could maybe technically theoretically lead to pregnancy. So semen is pretty sperm-potent. Just to give some context, Minkin says, a "low sperm count" is anything less than 20 million sperm per 1 mL of semen — and 10 or 15 million per 1 mL is still a lot of sperm.
