nonconception

English

Alternative forms

• non-conception

Etymology

non- +‎ conception

Noun

nonconception (countable and uncountable, plural nonconceptions)

1. A failure to conceive; The aftermath of sexual intercourse in which there is no fertilization of an egg by sperm.
   • 1996, Biometrics, page 946:

     With this formulation, the probability of nonconception is simply the product of the day-specific failure probabilities multiplied across all days where there was intercourse.

   • 2005, Vinita Bhargava, Adoption in India: Policies and Experiences, page 86:

     A long period of nonconception, usually the two or three years after marriage, leads to worries of a possible medical problem in the couple.

   • 2002, Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life:

     In the case of nonconception, there is a loss of an enormous amount of possible future good but there is no victim of the loss, no existing individual whose good it would have been.

   • 2019, Espen Gamlund, Carl Tollef Solberg, Saving People from the Harm of Death, page 112:

     For all these reasons, I assume that nonconception is better than a constantly neutral life.

2. An unthought concept.
   • 1836, The Monthly Review, page 384:

     It is to a nonconception of this plain truth, namely, that money is as much a marketable commodity as any of those things for which it is given in exchange, that we must ascribe the ignorance that prevails concerning the laws by which its value and its distribution are regulated, and of the consequences which follow when the natural operation of these laws is disturbed.