Where Are Your Ovaries in Relation to Your Belly Button?

Your ovaries sit deep in the lower pelvis, well below the belly button, one on each side of the uterus. Each one rests in a shallow depression on the inner pelvic wall, roughly 8 to 13 centimeters (3 to 5 inches) below the navel and several centimeters off to either side. Their position is not permanently fixed the way a kidney is, though, and it shifts meaningfully with pregnancy, aging, body composition, and certain medical conditions.

How to Picture Their Location on Your Body

The easiest surface landmark is the line between your two hip bones, the bony points you can feel at the front of your pelvis (the anterior superior iliac spines, if you want the anatomical name). Your ovaries sit at or just below that line, deep inside the pelvic cavity. If you place your hands flat on your lower abdomen with your thumbs touching at the belly button and your fingers spread downward, each ovary would be roughly beneath where your pinky fingers rest, a few inches above the pubic bone and a few inches in from each hip.

During the reproductive years, each ovary is roughly the size of a large almond, about 3 centimeters long, 2 centimeters wide, and 1 centimeter thick. They are not organs you can feel by pressing on your abdomen under normal circumstances. They sit behind the peritoneum, surrounded by loops of bowel, and separated from your fingertips by skin, fat, muscle, and fascia.

Unlike many organs that are firmly anchored in place, the ovaries are somewhat mobile. They’re suspended by a set of ligaments: the suspensory ligament connects each ovary to the pelvic sidewall and carries its blood supply, while the uteroovarian ligament tethers it to the uterus. A fold of peritoneum called the mesovarium attaches the ovary to the broad ligament. This suspension system keeps the ovaries in the general neighborhood of their expected position but allows enough slack for them to shift with changes in body position, bladder fullness, bowel distension, and uterine size.

Why They End Up in the Pelvis in the First Place

The reason ovaries sit so far below the belly button traces back to fetal development. In early embryonic life, the gonads form near the kidneys, high in the abdominal cavity. Over the course of development, they descend. In males, the testes migrate all the way out of the abdomen into the scrotum, guided by a structure called the gubernaculum. In females, a similar structure guides the ovaries partway down, but they stop at the pelvic brim rather than continuing outward.

The female gubernaculum gives rise to the round ligament of the uterus and plays a role in the development of the reproductive tract as a whole.¹ This is why the ovaries sit so much lower than the kidneys but stay inside the body, unlike their male counterparts. The compact, basin-shaped human pelvis that resulted from bipedal evolution created the ovarian fossa, the specific shallow depression where each ovary typically rests.² In quadrupedal mammals, the pelvis is longer and narrower, and the ovaries hang differently. In humans, the bowl-shaped pelvis tucks the ovaries into a protected position close to the fallopian tube openings, which is efficient for egg capture at ovulation but makes them harder to examine from the outside.

Occasionally, the embryonic descent does not happen normally, and an ovary remains above the pelvic brim. This condition, called ovarian maldescent, is rare but can be associated with malformations of the uterus and fallopian tubes.³ When an ovary fails to descend, imaging has to search for it in the upper abdomen or near the lower ribs rather than in the pelvis, and the person may have no idea anything is unusual until a scan picks it up.

How Body Size Changes the Picture

The distance between your belly button and your internal organs is not constant across body types. People with higher body mass carry thicker abdominal walls, which shifts the relationship between surface landmarks and what lies beneath. One study measuring abdominal wall thickness found that at the umbilicus, the wall was significantly thicker in obese patients than in non-obese ones, and that body mass index correlated strongly with wall thickness at that point.⁴

For you as someone trying to understand where your ovaries are, the practical takeaway is this: the ovaries occupy the same anatomical position regardless of your size, but the depth between the skin at your belly button and those ovaries varies considerably. In a very lean person, pelvic organs may be just a few centimeters from the surface. In someone with a larger body, the distance is substantially greater, and the belly button itself may sit lower or higher on the abdomen depending on how fat is distributed.

Surgeons care about these relationships because they use the belly button as a primary entry point for laparoscopic procedures. It is usually the thinnest part of the abdominal wall. Research on trocar insertion has shown that even the relationship between the umbilicus and the aorta (the body’s largest artery, which runs along the spine at roughly the same depth as the pelvis) varies enough between patients to warrant careful planning.⁵ The belly button is a useful surface landmark, but the internal landscape beneath it is shaped by individual anatomy in ways that are not always predictable from the outside.

Shifts During Pregnancy and After Menopause

During pregnancy, the uterus expands dramatically, rising out of the pelvis and into the abdominal cavity. The ovaries are dragged along to some degree, since they are tethered to the uterus by the uteroovarian ligament. By the second trimester, the ovaries can sit several centimeters higher than their usual position, sometimes approaching or reaching the level of the belly button. After delivery, they gradually return to their pre-pregnancy location as the uterus shrinks back to its normal size over a period of weeks.

Menopause brings a different kind of change. Ovarian volume drops substantially in the years following the last menstrual period, with the most rapid decline happening in the first five to ten years. Ultrasound studies have shown that the postmenopausal ovary is typically no larger than about 2 by 3 by 4 centimeters, and its volume can fall to roughly 1 to 6 cubic centimeters depending on how many years have passed.⁶ As the ovaries shrink and the pelvic floor loosens with age, the distance between the vaginal fornix and the ovaries tends to increase. This is one reason transvaginal ultrasound becomes harder to interpret in older patients: the ovaries are still in the pelvis, but they become smaller, harder to distinguish from surrounding tissue, and sometimes slightly displaced from their usual fossa.

When an Ovary Ends Up Far from Home

There are situations where an ovary can be found well outside its expected position. The most dramatic acute example is ovarian torsion, where the ovary (often enlarged by a cyst) twists on its ligaments and can migrate upward into the abdomen. In one reported case, a torsioned ovarian cyst was found at surgery in the right upper quadrant, far above the pelvis and well above the belly button.⁷ This kind of displacement is uncommon but clinically important, because symptoms show up in a location nobody associates with the ovary, leading to confusion and delays in diagnosis.

Large ovarian cysts can push the ovary upward even without torsion. A cyst that grows to 10 or 15 centimeters in diameter effectively becomes an abdominal mass that rises above the pelvic brim, and the ovary goes with it. In those cases, a person might feel fullness or a firm area at or above the level of the belly button and not connect it to a gynecologic problem at all.

Endometriosis represents another route to displacement, though less dramatic. Adhesions from endometriosis can fix an ovary to the lateral pelvic wall, the back of the uterus, or the bowel, pulling it away from its expected position. The prevalence of adhesions in endometriosis is very high, and these adhesions can make surgical access to the ovary difficult.⁸ The ovary remains in the pelvis but is no longer sitting freely in its fossa, which matters for both imaging interpretation and surgical planning.

Ovarian Transposition in Cancer Treatment

Surgeons sometimes deliberately move the ovaries away from their normal position. In younger patients with cervical cancer who undergo radical hysterectomy, the ovaries may be surgically relocated to move them out of the radiation field and preserve hormonal function. This procedure, called ovarian transposition or ovariopexy, involves detaching the ovary from its pelvic connections (while preserving its blood supply) and suturing it higher, typically near the iliac crest or on the lateral abdominal wall.

Research tracking where transposed ovaries ended up found that their median distance from the iliac crest was only about 0.5 centimeters, and that how high they were placed affected whether they continued producing hormones normally.⁹ After transposition, a person’s ovaries might sit at hip-bone level or higher, nowhere near their original pelvic position. These patients still have functioning ovaries producing estrogen and progesterone, but those ovaries are no longer where an anatomy diagram would show them. Any future imaging or symptom evaluation has to account for this unusual geography.

Ovariopexy is also sometimes used as a temporary measure during endometriosis surgery, to keep the ovaries out of an area where adhesions are likely to re-form.⁸ In those cases the repositioning is intended to be short-term, but whether the ovaries drift back to their original spot afterward varies.

What Ovary Location Means for Understanding Pain

One of the most common reasons people look up ovary location is to make sense of pelvic pain. Knowing where the ovaries sit explains why ovarian pain registers where it does, and why it can be so easily confused with other problems.

Because the ovaries sit low in the pelvis and off to either side, ovarian pain typically shows up in the lower abdomen, below and lateral to the belly button. The classic location is in the right or left lower quadrant, roughly in the zone between the navel and the hip bone on the corresponding side. This is where you would feel mittelschmerz (the mild, mid-cycle twinge some people notice around ovulation), and it is also where pain from a small ovarian cyst usually starts.

The confusion arises because this overlaps with the location of other structures. Right lower-quadrant pain can come from the appendix, the right ovary, the right ureter, or the cecum. Left lower-quadrant pain can originate from the left ovary, the sigmoid colon, or a kidney stone working its way down. Emergency physicians consider ovarian torsion in the differential diagnosis for any patient with acute lower-quadrant pain precisely because the anatomy overlaps so heavily with the appendix and the gastrointestinal tract.

When an ovarian problem is severe, such as a large ruptured cyst or torsion, the pain can radiate upward or spread across the entire lower abdomen, making pinpointing even harder. And as noted in the section on displacement, a very large cyst or torsioned ovary can produce pain well above the pelvis, at or above the navel, which is far from where anyone would expect ovarian trouble. If you are experiencing unexplained abdominal pain and are unsure whether it involves the ovaries, the location alone cannot give you a definitive answer. But knowing that ovarian pain tends to center in the lower quadrants, about halfway between the belly button and the groin, and that it often has a one-sided quality, at least gives you a useful starting framework for the conversation with your doctor.

Why the Ovaries Are So Hard to Image from the Outside

Given that the ovaries are only about 3 to 5 inches below the belly button, you might expect them to be easy to see on imaging. In practice, they are among the more frustrating organs to visualize. Part of this is size: even a healthy ovary during peak reproductive years is quite small, and it sits nestled among bowel loops that produce gas shadows and movement artifacts on imaging. The other part is depth. The ovaries are near the bottom of the pelvic bowl, behind the bladder and beside the uterus, which means an ultrasound probe placed on the lower abdomen has to send its beam through several tissue layers and compete with whatever is in the bladder and bowel at that moment.

This is why transvaginal ultrasound, where the probe is placed inside the vaginal canal and positioned close to the cervix, became the standard approach for evaluating the ovaries. The vaginal probe sits only a few centimeters away from each ovary, bypassing the abdominal wall entirely. The trade-off is that transvaginal imaging has a limited field of view. If an ovary is displaced upward by a large mass or torsion, the vaginal probe may not reach it, and a transabdominal approach or CT scan becomes necessary. The abdominal wall thickness data discussed earlier also applies here: in patients with higher BMI, transabdominal imaging of pelvic structures becomes less reliable because the ultrasound beam has to travel farther and loses resolution.⁴

After menopause, imaging challenges compound. The ovaries shrink, lose their follicular landmarks (the small fluid-filled structures that make them recognizable on ultrasound during the reproductive years), and can blend into surrounding tissue. The increased distance between the vaginal fornix and the ovaries after menopause adds another layer of difficulty.⁶ Radiologists sometimes report “ovaries not visualized” on postmenopausal imaging, which does not mean the ovaries are missing. It means they are too small and too similar in density to the surrounding tissue to be confidently identified on that particular scan.