Law Of Inverse Fertility / Live-Action TV

• The 10th Kingdom: Virginia gets pregnant by Wolf with no intent to.
• On 3rd Rock from the Sun, Vicki and Harry go to a doctor when they can't seem to have a baby. Subverted in that they had only been trying for a month.
  Vicki: Well, it's not like we've been doing anything else.
• Accused (2023): In "Jessie's Story", Kara had been told she's infertile and might not ever be able to have children. She got pregnant due to a one-night-stand without meaning to. As she wanted a baby very much, she leapt at the chance and made up a story (as the father is her married neighbor), claiming the conception was by sperm donation.
• All My Children's Edmund and Maria struggled to conceive via in vitro fertilization for roughly a year, then struggle to adopt; just as everything seems to be settled, the birth mother changes her mind. Within a few months, both situations do a complete 180. The birth mother gives them her baby after all, and Maria finally conceives naturally.
• In American Horror Story: Freak Show, Desiree (the intersex burlesque dancer with three breasts) suddenly experiences severe bleeding downstairs during sex. She's rushed to the hospital where the doctor informs her that she had a miscarriage, even though she thought it was impossible for her to ever become pregnant in the first place. The doctor informs her that her "penis" is actually an enlarged clitoris, which along with her third breast are the result of a hormonal imbalance, and a simple surgery could make her normal. However, her Armored Closet Gay husband threatens to kill him if he tries it. The series ends with her marrying a new man and having two children with him.
• Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: It's established that vampires cannot have kids. When Angel and Darla—both vampires—have sex, however, she winds up pregnant, with some kind of magic preventing her from aborting. Weirder still, the child turns out to be at least Ambiguously Human. It's eventually revealed that Jasmine, a Power That Was, arranged this to happen as part of her master plan.
• Early in Another Life (2019), the whole crew is said to be sterilized by exposure to radiation. But many episodes later, after several of them start hooking up, one woman discovers that she's pregnant. Cue much surprise and angsting about whether to keep the baby. Which all becomes moot shortly afterward, when she is vaporized by a plasma leak.
• Belgravia: Oliver and Susan Trenchard have been trying to have a child without success for 11 years of marriage. Since Susan becomes pregnant from her affair with John Bellasis, it's heavily implied Oliver is sterile.
• Both sides are featured in Boardwalk Empire. On the one hand, Rose Van Alden, who wants a child more than anything in the world and practically considers sex a chore to get that, can't conceive. Her husband Nelson is not so thrilled about having children himself but knocks up Lucy during his first and only one-night stand. Meanwhile, Lucy is advised to stop using birth control in order to secure Nucky for herself but only gets pregnant after he has abandoned her.
• The Bold and the Beautiful Ridge and Taylor fail to conceive despite being Insatiable Newlyweds and their doctors assuring them that they are both fertile. She finally does get pregnant years later, after she's been presumed dead and he's married someone else.
• In Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Jake and Amy begin trying for a baby in season 7. In the episode appropriately titled "Trying", which takes place over the course of several months, the two try and try again with absolutely no success whatsoever. This makes them feel even worse when Hitchcock and his new wife get pregnant on their first try and a pair of guinea pigs hiding in one of the storage rooms have over 600 babies.
• Brothers & Sisters: Given the fecundity of their parents, the Walker kids seem to have an unusual amount of fertility problems, Sarah being the sole exception.
  • Tommy and his wife Julia try to have a baby, but it ultimately turns out that Tommy is sterile. Julia eventually conceives using sperm donated by Kevin and Justin. But when she gives birth to twins, one dies and the other nearly does as well.
  • Kitty is likewise unable to conceive with Robert, even after undergoing fertility treatments. They end up adopting a baby boy. After Robert's death, and despite having undergone treatment for Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, Kitty later becomes pregnant by her much younger boyfriend Seth. The ultimate fate of this pregnancy is unknown, as the series was Cut Short.
  • Kevin and Scotty hire a friend to be a surrogate. They start running into problems like having difficulty with conception and eventual miscarriage. They then give up on that idea and adopt a 9-year-old girl, with whom they are happy. Later, they learn that their surrogate was lying about the miscarriage and took the baby for herself. So they get the baby back, but then their adopted daughter's homophobic brother who abandoned her wants to take her away from them. He fails.
  • While never directly stated onscreen, evidence suggests that Justin may also be sterile or have defective sperm. Despite years of casual sex, often influenced by drugs and alcohol, with many women, he has seemingly never fathered any children. The fact that Tommy and Julia's daughter Elizabeth is confirmed to be Kevin's biological child seems to support this. Justin later fathers a child with Rebecca, but she miscarries.
• Played with in Castle. In season five's Christmas Episode, Kevin Ryan and his wife Jenny decide to have a kid. Several episodes later Ryan shows up looking rather haggard from... repeated attempts, and in a late-season episode, they go to see a fertility doctor for tests only to have it turn out they wasted their money because they already succeeded.
• On Charmed:
  • After a year of marriage, Piper and Leo are trying to get pregnant, and Piper finds out that the physical toll of demon-fighting has made it "difficult if not impossible" for her to get pregnant. Meanwhile, Phoebe has been married for about a month and finds out that she's pregnant, despite not wanting children. (In this case, though, her husband — secretly the Big Bad — was trying to have a kid without her realizing it.) Phoebe's fear of telling Piper turns into a Milholland Relationship Moment, and long story short, Phoebe's Fetus Terrible explodes and Piper winds up pregnant. (In fact, she eventually has two more kids, and the second, at least, is known to be an "accident.")
  • When the sisters traveled back in time to the 1970s, they discovered that their mother was told she wouldn't be able to conceive again after Piper. She reveals this while already pregnant with Phoebe. It became almost comical when backstage shenanigans necessitated revealing that Patty had a fourth child.
  • Phoebe somehow found herself on both sides of this simultaneously in later seasons. After having had a pair of premonitions of herself as a mother, her major motivation is ensuring that they come true. She's constantly consulting various auguring methods and charts to see whether she's passed the conception date, and she actually lost her active powers via abusing them so as to not waste time with a Romantic False Lead and find the child's father faster. But when she discovers she's pregnant in season 8, it's just after she's broken up with a man she accidentally married while using a magical fake identity (it's a long story), so it's still far from good news. Then it turns out that it was a false positive, so she goes right back to her star charts. The sequel comic states that she finally got pregnant on her honeymoon with her third (and final) husband, and later had two more daughters.
  • While less extreme than the other women in her family, the comics noted that Paige's daughters were an unplanned pregnancy.
• Chasing Life:
  • April wants to have kids someday, so she's understandably upset when she learns the cancer treatments will likely leave her infertile. She ends up visiting a fertility doctor, and has her eggs harvested before starting chemotherapy.
  • Brenna got pregnant from the first boy she had sex with (the only one, at that point), having an abortion.
• Provides the motivation for murder in the Cold Case episode "Family", and a kidnapping case in "Ghost Of My Child".
• Coupling: in the season finale, Susan is desperate to conceive but is told the chances are low, while Sally has a pregnancy scare when she doesn't want a baby. Subverted as Susan finds out at the last minute that she's pregnant, and Sally isn't (Jane was also involved in the test mix-up and she was not pregnant).
• Deputy: Cade and Teresa Wade have been trying without success to have a baby. They decide on adoption after meeting some Latino siblings in need. After adopting them, Teresa learns that she's finally pregnant.
• On Desperate Housewives, Gabrielle took a tumble down the stairs a few minutes after she accepted her pregnancy. When she later decided she wanted to try to have a baby, "complications" from the fall made her unable to do it the old-fashioned way. She and Carlos attempted to adopt a baby but were thwarted when an employee of the agency blabbed Gabrielle's history of statutory rape and Carlos' slave labor charges. They managed to adopt a child through the services of a private adoption lawyer but the biological mother had a change of heart and took the child back. Finally, they used a surrogate, and nine months later discovered there had been an embryo mix-up and the baby belonged to someone else.
  • In Season 5 we find out Gabby had two miracle pregnancies... right after her husband went blind and they lost all their money.
  • Lynette gets pregnant at the end of Season 5, despite having just undergone chemo and being, judging by the age of her older children, well in her forties. Well, at least it gave occasion to one of the best lines of the season: "Are you sure it's not cancer?"
• In an episode of Dharma & Greg, Dharma became convinced that she and Greg were about to have a baby after seeing a vision. They tried to have a baby for a long time, using various methods, but, in the end, it was Dharma's middle-aged mother who became pregnant. Dharma explained that her vision was correct, but that she just misplaced its womb.
• Played for drama on the Doctor Who episode "Asylum of the Daleks". Due to her ordeal at Demon's Run, Amy learned that she couldn't have any more children. Knowing that Rory had always wanted children of his own, Amy decided to divorce him in the hopes that he could start over with someone who could give him the family she couldn't. "I didn't kick you out, Rory, I gave you up!" Amy and Rory are a pretty good example of this trope since they (presumably) weren't trying to have kids when Amy got pregnant with Melody, but now, thanks to the events on Demon's Run, they wouldn't be able to have kids even if they wanted to (as Rory apparently does).
  • Supplemental material revealed that after their departure from the show, they went on to adopt at least one child.
• Rampant on Downton Abbey. The only woman on the show who actually gets pregnant without difficulty when she wants to is Sybil, and she ends up dying as a result.
  • The second season presents the housemaid Ethel, who has a few dalliances with an officer convalescing at Downton, resulting in her pregnancy.
  • The third season gives us Matthew and Mary, married and trying, and failing. They both secretly go to a fertility specialist about it in London and run into each other there.
  • In the fourth season, Edith spends one night with the man she's planning on marrying before he goes off to Germany to divorce his first wife and gets killed in the Beer Hall Putsch, and ends up with an illegitimate daughter.
  • The fifth season reveals that Anna and Bates have been trying unsuccessfully to have children for some time, leading to a sustained misunderstanding when Bates discovers the birth control paraphernalia that Anna has been hiding for Mary. (A trip to the same fertility specialist Matthew and Mary visit finally allows her to carry a child to term.)
  • There are two notable subversions in Season 4, however. The first is in the case of Anna's rape. Following it, Mrs. Hughes and Anna worry about the possibility of Anna becoming pregnant, with a very upset Anna threatening to kill herself if it turns out to be the case. It isn't. The second is when Edna gets Tom drunk and tries to get him to marry her by heavily implying that she's pregnant with his child and he must marry her to take responsibility. Tom very nearly gives in, until Mrs. Hughes investigates the matter and finds a book on birth control in Edna's room. Between that and the fact that Edna wouldn't want to be pregnant until knowing for certain if Tom was going to marry her, she concludes that Edna ensured she didn't get pregnant that night and was planning to find some other man to knock her up once Tom agreed. (After the whole thing was over, Mrs. Hughes then told Tom that even if Edna was pregnant, it would have been way too early even for her to know.)
• Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman:
  • The titular character fears she's too old to conceive when she realizes that, despite she and Sully being Insatiable Newlyweds, she hasn't. Sure enough, upon going to another doctor for an evaluation, it turns out she's pregnant.
  • Quinn's best friend Dorothy stops getting her period and assumes she's pregnant when it turns out that menopause is starting.
• May Wright, one of EastEnders' most popular villains, was a perfectly nice doctor who miscarried her child and was rendered infertile as a result. Not even repeated fertility treatments could work. This woman was as barren as a brick wall. This tipped her off the Despair Event Horizon and becoming an Axe-Crazy Manipulative Bitch who conspired to steal her husband's lover's baby in order to replace her own. After kidnapping Dawn and trying to force a Cesarean on her, chasing after her while she escaped screaming "I WANT MY BABY!", trying to steal the baby from the hospital after Dawn gave birth, getting arrested, being released, trying to steal the baby again, breaking Dawn's ankle and chopping down a door with a crowbar, Jack Nicholson-style, she realised that she wasn't getting her hands on this baby. She just gave up and committed suicide. The actress who played her must have been picking scenery out of her teeth for months.
• ER: The reactions of most of the women on this show who found themselves pregnant indicate that this trope applies. Commenters on other boards frequently expressed amazement that a group of medical professionals seemed so incapable of properly using birth control, if they even used it all, given how frequently unplanned/unwanted pregnancies happened. And the one couple that did plan a pregnancy—Doug and Carol—still had this trope apply. When they were blissfully happy together, they struggled to conceive, only for her to discover that she was pregnant just after he resigned in disgrace and left town.
• Farscape: Princess Katralla from the "Look at the Princess" trilogy can only become Empress of her planet if she has an heir. Unfortunately, her younger brother poisoned her DNA which means she can't reproduce with any Sebacean male. Enter John Crichton, who as a human is still perfectly compatible with Katralla and can provide her with the child she needs.
• In an episode of Flashpoint, one couple desperately wanted a baby but simply couldn't have one. Then the husband had a one-time affair with an ex-girlfriend, who of course became pregnant.
• Subverted in Frasier, when Niles and Daphne are trying to have a child. Niles finds out that he has lethargic sperm and goes through a whole rigmarole of ridiculous procedures to increase his chances of impregnating Daphne. He then finds out that she is already pregnant.
  Niles: But, my slow sperm...
  Daphne: I must have fast eggs.
  • Played straight, however, with Roz, who gets pregnant even though she doesn't want to and has been using birth control.
    Roz: The best birth control is only effective 99 out of 100 times. I can't beat those odds.
• A French Village:
  • Lucienne gets pregnant by Kurt when he says they had been taking care to not have it happen.
  • Rita later also gets pregnant unintentionally by Jean.
• Very much in effect in Friends: There are a lot of accidental and engineered pregnancies, but the two couples that desperately wanted children are the ones that are unable to conceive naturally.
  • It's only after Ross has divorced his wife, who had found out she was gay, that they both learn she's pregnant from one last fling they'd had at the end of their marriage. This is after them having been together for seven years (four of which they were married) without any baby coming along.
  • Frank Jr. and Alice desperately want children, but can't due to Alice being in her 40s, so they blindside Phoebe by asking her to be their surrogate. Only after she agrees does she learn how low the success rate actually is and that her brother only has one shot at this because it's so expensive. She ends up pregnant far faster than medical science predicted and with three of the five embryos that were implanted.
  • Rachel did have a plan that involved meeting the right guy, dating him, getting engaged, and then being married for a healthy period of time before having children. It didn't work out that way, and she became pregnant after a one-night stand with Ross just before Chandler and Monica's wedding. They'd even taken precautions, too.
  • Monica was the one member of the gang who had wanted children from the earliest episodes and even lost one serious relationship because of her desire for children and her (older) partner's desire not to have any more. However, after she learns Chandler's more than ready to have children with her, they discover they each have fertility problems and that it'll be very unlikely that they could ever conceive naturally, making them the second couple that wants children but can't have them. They eventually adopt twins; the producers also revealed they view the couple as having a biological child post-show.
  • Janice's first husband is not much of a family man at all but has no trouble having children with Janice. Janice's second husband, however, is a much better family man and desperately wants children, but has fertility issues, resulting in them needing medical help each time they want to have a child.
  • Ross and Monica's parents were told they were incapable of having children - then Ross came along. It's cited as the reason for Monica being The Un-Favourite. Ross was the miracle baby, while Monica was just another birth.
• Glee:
  • The show features Terri, who is desperate for a baby yet can't get pregnant. Meanwhile, the religious celibacy club president Quinn cheats on her boyfriend and has sex with his best friend once and ends up pregnant. The two stories then overlap as not only do both women pull The Baby Trap on their respective men but Terri is attempting to secretly adopt from Quinn.
  • On the other end of the scale it is a miracle that Brittany hasn't become pregnant. She has claimed to have had sex with almost every guy in the school and yet she thinks using protection means having a burglar alarm and additionally she still thinks babies come from the stork.
  • There's also Shelby Corcoran, who after giving Rachel up to her fathers after she was paid to be their surrogate is told she can no longer have children. She finds her way around it by adopting Quinn's daughter.
• Flagrantly abused by Shonda Rimes on Grey's Anatomy. To date:
  • Addison cheats on her husband with Sloan, gets pregnant, aborts, and then when she tries to have a baby on her own finds out she's barren. Addison later adopts a son.
  • Cristina gets pregnant by accident; it turns out to be ectopic and she miscarries before she can abort.
  • Bailey, after 7 years of trying, gets pregnant right when she's about to become an attending.
  • Adele gets pregnant at age 50 while separated from her husband, only to miscarry once they've reconciled.
  • Callie and George briefly talk about trying to have a baby which doesn't happen. Callie gets pregnant after sleeping with her best friend Sloan after a breakup with her girlfriend. Callie gets back together with Arizona and the three raise the baby together.
  • Sloan knocked up some chick when he was young and dumb and his teenage daughter shows up in season six, also knocked up.
  • Meredith gets pregnant, and though she is happy about it, she was on birth control... but then miscarries. She then spends all of season 7 trying to get pregnant, but she doesn't so they adopt a baby in season 8. The next season her and Derek are happy with Zola, only for her to get pregnant again. In season 11, Meredith finds herself pregnant shortly after Derek is killed in a car accident.
  • And then Cristina gets knocked up, AGAIN, despite only having one functional Fallopian tube, and desperately never wanting a child. She goes through with the abortion this time.
  • Lampshaded by Meredith when April, who had until recently been a virgin, had a pregnancy scare:
  "Plans never work out the way you think they're going to. Especially with babies. You try and try to get pregnant, you can't. And then a baby comes when you least expect it, probably because you didn't plan it."
  • April herself ended up having a baby boy (with Jackson), who died at birth from brittle bone disease. Then, the day she finalized her divorce with Jackson, April found out she was pregnant again. This child, a girl, luckily survived.
  • Gender-flipped with Owen, who always wanted children but several circumstances prevented this. Eventually, by the time he was in the process of adopting a boy, Owen discovered that his ex Teddy was pregnant with his child.
• In the Haven episode "Lost and Found," a man's Baby Be Mine Trouble is triggered after his sister-in-law announces her unplanned pregnancy. He is distraught that she is able to get pregnant by accident while he and his wife have struggled for years with infertility. It leads him to manifest Douen, who enchant his wife and local children into gathering in the woods to dance until they die from hypothermia.
• Played with in HEX: Cassie falls pregnant to Azazeal while under his influence. Upon discovering that she's pregnant, she decides to abort it. The baby survives and grows to adulthood, thanks to the efforts of the father.
• Cuddy from House went to great lengths to get pregnant. When that doesn't work out, she tries to adopt which doesn't work out either, at least at first.
• House of the Dragon:
  • King Viserys and Queen Aemma wanted to have a male heir, but they all perished either from miscarriage or shortly after birth (and Aemma ends up dying of a Traumatic C-Section during the final labor).
  • Rhaenyra Targaryen and Laenor Velaryon didn't manage to have children (apparently not for lack of trying even though Laenor is secretly gay) despite wanting a male heir, so Rhaenyra arranged to have children with her lover Harwin Strong. This caused another sort of problem.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • Averted in Season 4. Marshall and Lily decide that the time just isn't right for the two of them to have a baby, and they actually make it stick; Lily doesn't get pregnant. What makes it notable is that Alyson Hannigan, the actress who plays Lily, was pregnant throughout the season, but the writers still passed on the chance to write it into the story.
  • In an unbelievable coincidence, Cobie Smulders (who plays Robin) was also pregnant at the same time, and her character also had no desire for kids. Which makes this a Double Aversion for the writers who actually pulled it off.
  • Played straight in season six, where Lily and Marshall have decided that they want a baby and are having trouble conceiving. The trope is parodied initially, though; the first time they go to a fertility specialist, it's revealed that they've only been trying for six days. Subverted as of "Bad News." Marshall and Lily both learn that they are fertile. They've just had bad luck so far. (Lily becomes pregnant shortly afterwards.)
  • Subverted in season 7 when Robin, who absolutely despises kids, gets a pregnancy scare only to find out that not only is it a false positive, she's infertile. She has no idea how to react to it because she's never wanted kids, ever, but the knowledge that she can't have them, period, makes her realize that she might've wanted them someday, but now that choice has been taken from her and she'll never, ever be able to change her mind. It's made even worse when she's trying to convince herself that infertility is a good thing, now she'll never have to worry, she has no right to be sad because she never wanted kids in the first place, she's glad her and Barney's beautiful future kids that she's been imagining telling the story of how she met their father to aren't real...
  • Barney's stance on children wavers throughout the series, but overall he is against fatherhood. During the entire run of the series, he seduces countless women and none of them get pregnant... until the series finale, set over multiple years, where he accidentally gets a woman pregnant and is horrified. However, soon after his daughter Ellie is born, he completely falls in love with the baby upon holding her in his arms for the first time.
• The TLC reality show I Didnt Know I Was Pregnant showed women talking about suddenly going into labor and having a baby without ever knowing they were carrying in the first place. If you're wondering how such a thing is possible, many women don't gain a noticeable amount of weight during pregnancy, especially if they're already overweight, and they might normally have irregular periods or experience minor bleeding during the pregnancy and mistake that for their period. It becomes Fridge Horror since the women may have been drinkers, recreational drug users, and/or took legit medication that could have interfered with a pregnancy. But in most cases, the babies were born perfectly healthy, though at least one was born in a toilet because the mom thought she had to use the bathroom...
• Carrie and Doug's difficulties in having a baby were used occasionally on The King of Queens. One two-part episode had Carrie get pregnant, only to suffer a miscarriage. In the Grand Finale they end up adopting, only to find out that they are having one of their own as well.
• Law & Order: SVU: In "Branded", season 12 episode 6, Camille is impregnated at 14 by one incident of gang rape at her summer camp. She gives her infant daughter up for adoption and has no further contact with her until she hears a laugh in a public park, 14 years later, and recognizes the voice as surely being her daughter's, thus kicking off the main plot.
• This appears to be law #1 on Lost's island. Pregnancy is a death sentence for mother and baby, but normal sperm count is magnified by five.
  • Also seen in flashbacks. Sun and Jin desperately want a baby, and can't conceive. Claire is on the pill and gets pregnant.
• Mad Men uses this both ways with the same character: Pete unknowingly knocks up Peggy, who in turn is in very deep psychological denial about her pregnancy (and was on birth control), but takes years to do the same to his wife. Not only does she want a baby, but her father also demands a grandchild in return for helping Pete's business. They finally have a daughter, Tammy, in season four.
  • Again played two ways with Joan, who tries for months to get pregnant with her husband's child, worrying that past abortions have possibly made her infertile, then becomes pregnant with Roger's on their one-night stand (and her only episode of infidelity).
  • Betty discovers she's pregnant while estranged from Don and considers aborting. They reconcile, but not much later they split up for good, and she's holding the baby on the plane as she and her second-husband-to-be fly to Reno to obtain the divorce.
  • Through flashbacks, we find out that Son of a Whore Don was only taken in by his father's wife because all of her pregnancies had ended in stillbirths and she desperately wanted a child. She had a son of her own about ten years later.
• Subverted in Mama's Family, where Vinton and Naomi had reached the end of their rope (turned down for adoption, Vinton's low sperm count) and were about to move away from Thelma's house after a nasty row, only to find out Naomi was pregnant after all.
• Happens on Martin. His girlfriend Gina misses her period and Hilarity Ensues as they and their friends scramble about getting her tested for pregnancy and if they're ready for a baby. Just when Martin and Gina warm up to the idea of having a child, it turns out she wasn't pregnant after all.
• Played straight on Merlin. Ygraine is desperate to give Uther an heir but is unable to do so. She gets so desperate that she turns to magic — or Uther gets so desperate that they do, we don't know for sure — and though she gets pregnant, she dies giving birth.
• Mike & Molly: After years of trying to get pregnant, Mike and Molly pursue adoption. In the series finale, their adopted baby is born. Molly, holding the baby and surrounded by family and friends, mentions those other stories about couples who get finally conceive when the pressure is off. And she'd just taken a pregnancy test, and now she's expecting. Awww.....
• Modern Family presents an interesting variation: in Season 3 Mitchell and Cameron, a gay couple who already have one adopted daughter, have decided to try for a son through various means (several variations on adoption, surrogacy, etc.) only to see every attempt fall through in increasingly heartbreaking ways. Meanwhile, Mitchell's step-mother Gloria, in her late thirties/early forties, becomes pregnant by her sixty-something husband: a pregnancy they were definitely not planning, and which comes as a bit of shock to the whole family.
• Implied to have been the case with Jessica and her late husband Frank in Murder, She Wrote. In the pilot, Jessica explains her childlessness to a new suitor by saying "We were never blessed in that way."
• Noughts & Crosses: Sephy gets pregnant by Callum without intending to. For bonus points, it's possibly her first time and the sole instance (that we know of) where they had sex.
• This is really played up in the Korean Drama Ojakgyo Brothers. Cha Soo Young had surgery that removed one ovary completely and partially removed the other, yet became pregnant by a one-night-stand with her coworker.
• On One Life to Live, Happily Married couple Andrew and Cassie are elated to be having a baby boy; unfortunately, a tumble down some stairs causes Cassie to miscarry, and she's unable to get pregnant again. They're later able to adopt the son of an unwed teenager, although their marriage eventually crumbles nevertheless.
• On One Tree Hill, Brooke Davis wants to be a mother, but her foster daughter leaves her, and she ultimately discovers she is infertile. She ends up having twins anyway.
• Averted on Orphan Black. Gracie is subjected to Medical Rape and Impregnate, but she ends up having a miscarriage. Later it's revealed that she contracted a pathogen from her husband which renders infected women infertile. When she learns this, she admits that it doesn't bother her because she never wanted kids anyway.
• Zig-zagged in the Season 5 finale of Parks and Recreation. Andy is trying to figure out which of the women in the office is pregnant. The first one he rules out is Ann, who ends up helping him "investigate" the other women. Ann is, of course, the one who's pregnant.
  • Played With in Season 6, as well. Leslie and Ben back-and-forth a lot on the issue of having kids after getting married, in part because they're both very career-minded and a little on the older side (already in their late thirties). Leslie then discovers she's gotten pregnant accidentally and struggles with how to break it to Ben - who, fortunately, had that very day decided once and for all that he wanted to be a father. They're both thrilled until it turns out she's pregnant with triplets, making their prospects for an easy "later-in-life" pregnancy and juggling their careers with parenting literally three times harder.
• Reign:
  • Francis and Mary try for a baby multiple times with no luck. Olivia desperately tries to conceive with Francis in the hopes of him marrying her or keeping her around as his mistress. Lola and Francis have sex once and end up pregnant with a baby neither wants.
  • Catherine tried desperately for years to have a baby with Henry, up to using several crazy medicinal treatments. They ended up having several children but at the cost of their once-loving marriage. Meanwhile, Catherine has an affair and ends up pregnant with the other man's child (long before she has one of Henry's) and has to secretly give the baby up.
• Played straight on Rules of Engagement with Jeff and Audrey not only unable to have children but having major trouble with surrogates.
• Very much in force in Saving Hope. Both Maggie and Alex get pregnant even though they definitely do not want kids (at least, not yet). Maggie's leads to a Convenient Miscarriage; Alex decides to carry the baby to term and keep it (with plenty of Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe hijinks.) On the flip side, Dawn decides she wants to have a baby (with Charlie) and remains completely convinced that she will have no trouble conceiving even though she's past optimum child-bearing age. Dawn is completely crushed when the OB tells her that her eggs are not viable.
• Played hilariously straight on Scrubs, where J.D. accidentally impregnated his girlfriend without even having sex with her (he didn't have a condom, and he didn't want to get her pregnant), Jordan and Dr. Cox had Jack with their relationship being little more than a booty call, and Jennifer Dylan after Dr. Cox had two vasectomies. Turk and Carla, on the other hand, had to both have fertility tests and counseling before they finally had Izzy.
• In Sex and the City, Charlotte, who is the character who's the most excited about the idea of marriage and family, turns out to have trouble conceiving. Miranda, who's more lukewarm on the subject, suffers an unplanned pregnancy. What's more, Miranda had a lazy ovary and the man who impregnated her had lost one testicle to cancer!
  • Charlotte does get pregnant in The Movie, though, as an example of "getting pregnant once you stop trying."
  • Also averted with Samantha, who remains adamant that she doesn't want children throughout the series and movie, and doesn't have any.
• On Sisters, youngest sister Frankie and her husband struggle to conceive for months before finally realizing that it isn't going to happen the natural way. To that end, all of her sisters volunteer to be a surrogate mother for her. When the one she chooses is about halfway through the pregnancy, she begins to suspect that she herself has finally conceived after all, only for it to turn out that she hasn't.
• Used multiple times in Six Feet Under. Spoilers ahoy: Lisa becomes pregnant with Nate's child after a one-night stand; she decides to keep the baby, which causes Nate much angst. After Nate and Brenda decide to get married, Brenda becomes pregnant only to have a miscarriage the day before the wedding. They conceive again but only after their marriage has begun to show signs of strain. Claire gets pregnant by her boyfriend but only finds out after they break up; she chooses to abort, and during a hallucinatory trip to the land of the dead sees the baby in Lisa's arms and asks her to take care of him.
• Smallville:
  • Jonathan and Martha desperately wanted a child, but Martha turned out to be infertile. Cue baby Kal-El landing almost literally right in their laps.
  • In Season 2, Martha gets pregnant, thanks to Clark's ship (or rather, AI!Jor-El) healing her. Considering the AI's general personality and world view combined with its very occasional Pet the Dog habits, it is more than likely that it facilitated this as mixture of thanks to the Kents for raising Clark and in order to give them a replacement for Clark, allowing it to take him away to be trained. And no, it doesn't generally have much of a grasp on human nature. In any case, Status Quo Is God and Clark's attempt to destroy the ship ends up causing Martha to miscarry.
• South of Nowhere has Chelsea getting pregnant to Clay, and then deciding that she can't go through with an abortion. She later loses the baby in a car accident.
• St. Elsewhere There's a story arc about a married couple going through in-vitro fertilization at the hospital; at the same time, two mentally disabled patients experiment with sex once, and the girl conceives. The TV Guide description of the episode summarizes this trope: "The rabbit dies for the wrong woman."
• On Spartacus: Blood and Sand and Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, Lucretia tries for years to provide her husband Batiatus with an heir, even resorting to adultery with one of his gladiators due to the belief that a Gaul's seed was extraordinarily potent. Despite regularly having sex with both men and undergoing a fertility ritual, she remains unable to conceive. Until the end of season one. Not long afterwards, the Gaullish gladiator and probable father stabs her in the womb during a revolt.
• Justified in the Stargate SG-1 episode "2010", where in an alternate timeline Sam and her husband Joseph Faxon have been trying for a couple of years now to have a baby. It turns out the off-world government that helped them defeat the Goa'uld has now sterilized most of Earth's population.
• In season five of Stromberg, Jennifer gets pregnant with Stromberg's child, which was unwanted and thought they had used birth control. Conversely, in the same season, Tanja and Ulf are trying to have a child, but it turns out that Ulf is infertile.
• In That '70s Show this trope is invoked when Eric and Donna realize that Donna had missed a day of her birth control and were therefore convinced that Donna was pregnant. Most teenagers don't realize that birth control doesn't stop working just because you missed one day, so their panic is understandable.
• The Tunnel: Laura finds she's pregnant again in Season 1 when Karl just had a vasectomy because he already has four kids and didn't want any more. To top it off, they have twins.
• On The West Wing, we find out via flashbacks that Toby's wife Andi desperately wanted to have a baby, and they tried every fertility treatment under the sun. In the series timeline, they're divorced, but Andi becomes pregnant with Toby's twins — and then rejects his proposal of remarriage, saying that he's "sad," "angry" and "not warm," and she's worried about the influence he would have on the kids. Oddly, we're never told whether she finally had a successful in vitro fertilization using his stowed-away sperm or they rekindled their relationship long enough to do it the old-fashioned way. This is a point of contention in the fanbase: one side insists that it's too much of a long shot for Andi to have become pregnant just by luck, after failing for all those years, while the other maintains that if those are really her conclusions about Toby's potential as a family man, she wouldn't have intentionally made him the father of her children.
• In The X-Files, Scully is not only told she is infertile, but that she had her ova removed. While she had never given that much thought to having children before, she did after hearing that. An in-vitro attempt with Mulder failed, as did trying to adopt, and yet by the end of season seven, Scully is pregnant by circumstances never fully explained. However, Word of God did confirm that Mulder is the father of Baby William.
• Veep: As a middle-aged, divorced politician, the last thing Selina Meyer wants is another child, so of course she gets pregnant after having unprotected sex one time. She has a Convenient Miscarriage shortly afterwards. Meanwhile Mike McLintock, Selina's Director of Communications and his wife want to have a child, but they can't conceive, not even with using in vitro fertilization.
• Velvet: Pedro and Rita are eager to become parents, but have difficulty conceiving.
• The Witcher (2019): After giving up her ability to have children in exchange for losing her disabilities, Yennefer becomes intent on restoring it. She explains that it's not so much she's intent on having children, but wants to have the choice. Geralt, in contrast, is just as infertile as Yennefer and resolutely against having children but manages to acquire one anyway via the Law of Surprise and promptly spends the next twelve years avoiding her. When it comes out in an argument that he’s been lecturing Yennefer on wanting to have a child while “conspiring with Destiny to steal one,” she lets him have it for his hypocrisy.
• World on Fire: Lois gets pregnant unintentionally from sleeping with Harry just once.
• Underground:
  • Elizabeth badly wants to have a baby, but has trouble conceiving. Her pregnant sister-in-law Suzanna Macon likes to rub that fact in her face.
  • Rosalee later gets unintentionally pregnant due to having sex once with Noah.
• You Me Her: Jack and Emma have been trying to have a baby for years with no success. They see a specialist and Emma gets fertility medication, but even so, this doesn't work. When their doctor recommends surrogacy, they ask Izzy, their third, if she'll be the surrogate. She agrees to the idea but proposes instead reciprocal in virto fertilization, which means implanting her ova, fertilized by Jack, into Emma. However this turns out to be not what Emma wants, leaving them. After they have another threesome, Emma gets pregnant accidentally by Jack anyway, while it turns out it's twins.

---