Britney Spears is pregnant 10 months after she begged a judge to let her remove her IUD to have a baby. Here's how long it takes to conceive after coming off birth control.

• Britney Spears said she was pregnant in a Monday Instagram post.
• In June 2021, Spears begged a judge to let her remove her IUD, which she says she was forced to have under her conservatorship.

Britney Spears revealed she's pregnant in a Monday Instagram post, 10 months after she told a judge she wanted to remove her IUD to have more children.

During a June 2021 hearing, Spears said she was forced to stay on birth control under her 13-year conservatorship despite her wishes to grow her family.

"I would like to get married and have a baby. But this so-called team won't let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don't want me to have children," Spears told the judge. She has two teenage sons with ex-husband Kevin Federline.

In November 2021, a judge ended Spears' conservatorship, giving her the freedom to make her own birth-control choices again.

When a person stops taking birth control, they can't get pregnant right away, Insider previously reported. Long-acting reversible contraceptives like copper IUDs, injectables, and birth control pills delay a user's return to fertility because they affect their hormones and vaginal environment.

A November 2020 cohort study from researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark, Boston University, and Harvard University looked at various long-acting birth control methods to quantify the average number of menstrual cycles it takes to be able to conceive after birth control. They studied 17,954 people.

Using hormone-free condoms and diaphragms as controls in the study, the researchers found people who removed their hormonal or non-hormonal IUDs went through two menstrual cycles before they got pregnant.

The non-hormonal IUD, known by the brand name Paragard, is made from plastic wrapped in copper, a substance that stunts sperm so they can't swim to eggs and fertilize them, according to Planned Parenthood.

The hormonal IUD, which has the brand name Mirena, releases the hormone progestin. The extra progestin causes cervical mucus to thicken so sperm can't travel through the mucus to fertilize an egg. Progestin also causes the uterine lining to thin out, which partially prevents the uterus from releasing an egg during ovulation.

The hormones are localized, meaning they mainly affect the cervix and uterus where they're released. Just a small amount of the progestin is absorbed into your blood stream, Yale gynecologist Dr. Mary Jane Minkin previously told Insider.