Some people are able to get pregnant with ease. Others try for years and years with no success. For either group, getting pregnant is the culmination of their dreams of starting a family, and the vast majority of pregnant women do all they can to ensure the health of their unborn baby.
While that includes everything from moderate exercise to eating the right foods, you can never do enough to reduce your chance of miscarriage if you're serious about bringing your baby to term. Miscarriage, or spontaneous abortion (SAB), is what it's called when a pregnancy ends on its own before the twentieth week of pregnancy. In the majority of cases it is no one's fault; the chance of miscarriage is always there. But in some cases, a little preventative thinking and action could have reduced the chance of miscarriage and saved the unborn child.
And the chance of miscarriage is not to be taken lightly. While it's impossible to produce a comprehensively accurate number, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists puts the chance of miscarriage at anywhere from ten percent to twenty five percent. It's the single most common reason for a lost pregnancy, and it's important to do as much research as you can in order to reduce your chance at miscarriage.
That said, most miscarriages happen almost immediately after implantation. These are called chemical miscarriages, and they account for around seventy five percent of all miscarriages. Most women don't even realize they've experienced a chemical miscarriage after they've had one, as the bleeding that occurs is very similar to the bleeding a woman will experience during a particuarly heavy period. So most miscarriages are misidentified as a sort of hiccup in the menstrual cycle.
That said, there are still a significant amount of miscarriages that happen after that implantation period, and these are impossible to misidentify. A great number of these - perhaps the majority - are the result of a chromosomal abnormality in either the egg or the sperm. But lifestyle - drug and or alcohol use, as well as smoking, too much caffeine or exposure to to toxic substances - also claim their number of miscarriages.
There is also the sober truth that older women experience a much, much higher chance of miscarriage than younger women. Anyone over thirty five should consider it 50/50 whether they'll be able to bring their pregnancy to term.