When you have a tilted uterus

I recently went to the doctor and she told me that my uterus is tilted and that getting pregnant could be difficult for me. Can you explain what this means?

Rest assured, you have a very common condition. What your doctor meant was that your uterus is tilted backwards, or retroverted. About 30% of women in the U.S. have retroverted uteri (including myself — and anything that I have, I call normal!) and a tilted uterus should pose no problems whatsoever in conceiving.

In the old days, doctors did think that retroversion was associated with infertility, and recommended all sorts of procedures to hoist the uterus into a forward tilting position. Today, we do not do these procedures just for a tilted uterus.

Occasionally, however, a woman has a uterus that is pulled backwards by scarring from infections or endometriosis. If her gynecologist is operating to release the scarring, occasionally she will attach the uterus into a more forward position using some of the patient’s ligaments. But that would be for what we called fixed retroversion.

Very rarely, when a woman with a retroverted uterus gets pregnant, she sometimes has some difficulty urinating due to the pressure of her cervix on the bladder. That usually goes away by the fourth month of pregnancy, as the uterus grows forward out of the pelvis. And it isn’t a major problem.

So don’t spend any time worrying about your uterus, and get pregnant when you would like to.

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