In India, people who have sex before marriage rarely use condoms, a recent study found.

Only seven percent of young Indian women who have premarital sex ever use a condom. For guys the figure’s higher, but still just one in four ever used protection with a girlfriend. It’s down to lack of knowledge, embarrassment and trouble getting hold of condoms, the authors say.

Roughly a third of all unsafe abortions in 2008 happened in South-Central Asia, according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) estimates.

In India, three out of every five abortions are carried out under unsafe conditions. Yet abortion has been legal in the country for almost 40 years.

1. I had hard sex. Could it have harmed the baby?

Fertility testing for women is more complicated than it is for men, basically just because there are more different reasons you could be having trouble getting pregnant.

This means you might need to have various different tests. They could include:

Fertility testing for men is pretty straightforward. You need to provide a sample of sperm, and they'll check it out for you in the lab.

When you visit your health professional for a fertility test, first of all he may well want to ask you some pretty personal questions about your sex life, and also examine your genitals. Then he’ll send off a sample of your sperm to have it analysed.

So you've been patiently trying to get pregnant for 18 months or more. And you and your partner have tried all the tips. But you're still not pregnant.

You might want to start trying to find out if there’s some medical problem that’s stopping you getting pregnant.

For women who are trying to get pregnant, there’s one vitamin that’s particularly important: folic acid, or vitamin B9.

If you get at least 0.4 milligrams of this vitamin before you get pregnant and early in your pregnancy, your baby is much less likely to be born with serious defects like spina bifida. This is when the baby’s spine doesn’t close up properly.

If you’re too fat or too thin it can affect your chances of getting pregnant.

To get a rough idea of whether your weight could be affecting your fertility, you can work out your BMI.

BMI the complicated way
Your BMI is your weight (in kilos) divided by your height (in meters) squared. So if you weigh 72 kilograms and your height is 1.72 metres, your BMI is 72 divided by 1.72 x 1.72 = 24.9.

How can you increase your chances of getting pregnant? Here are some top tips for both men and women.

1. Have lots of sex! It might seem obvious, but you’re not actually going to get pregnant without having intercourse. And if you want to have the best chance, you should do it two or three times a week.

So you want to get pregnant? Luckily, for most people this isn’t a problem. More than half the women trying for a baby get pregnant within six months.

Other women need a bit more patience. You might have to wait for a year or more before you get pregnant. But most women will manage to get pregnant within about 18 months.