Fertility Stress
The title of the article: “Imagine a World Where Men Stressed About their Sperm as Much as Women Stress About Their Eggs.”
I love this article because the hypothetical man at the beginning of the article lives his life much as I did in the very beginning of wondering if there was something wrong with me when we were trying to conceive. (Once we got to the actual diagnosis, eating the right foods felt more like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.) And for this line: “Not only is John not real, the world I have just described does not exist.” In other words, while many (not all) women do a version of all the things listed at the beginning of the article, men do not.
Because, as the article points out, even though sperm are half the equation:
There is still no cohesive medical specialty devoted solely to men’s reproductive health, no recommendations that men have their reproductive organs examined regularly, no public health campaigns about the male biological clock, and no government labels warning men about the toxic effects of alcohol and drugs on sperm.
Go read the whole thing.
I have always been terrible with compartmentalization, and I chalked it up to the fact that everything was happening in my body. But maybe it’s also because I’ve been taught to pay attention to every twinge because the I have been taught to think about my body—from doctors to politicians to random stranger with opinions in the grocery store—nonstop. Until now when my body can no longer create a baby. Actually, scratch that. They’re going to keep regulating my body, even now. Because that’s what has always been done.
7 comments
Almost everything in our infertility treatment focused on me (female). I do legitimately have PCOS and while husband’s sperm analysis came back mildly “off” in one or two categories, we were told it wasn’t enough to be problematic in creating a baby. When we got to IVF, we always had a difficult time creating embryos, even though both of us were <35, my ovarian reserve and such were quite decent, and I responded well to ovarian stimulation. I asked if the problem might be husband's sperm since the eggs appeared to be good (we also had new information that pointed to sperm as a possible issue). The answer we got amounted to "It's possible, even probable, but we don't have the tests/knowledge to really evaluate sperm at that level as much as we do eggs". It was incredibly frustrating.
I think the part where men's health (particularly reproductive) needs far more attention is really good and I also really like how the article points out that we need to do this without all the toxic messaging/controlling that surrounds women's bodies (and we need to quit it with women's bodies as well). I do think that men are starting to get sucked into some of the toxicity around "wellness" and bodies – not to the degree women are, of course, not even close. A Slate article I read recently looks at the messaging men are getting around health/bodies and it was fascinating as well as really worrying: https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/men-wellness-dangerous-unpleasant.html .
Really interesting read – thanks for highlighting.
Interesting post. Not sure if you’ve seen this, I think that this is somewhat related: https://www.designmom.com/twitter-thread-abortion/
This is all really interesting — your post as well as the comments & links above. As Jody Day of Gateway Women has said, there’s a huge grey area in the childless/free community that falls somewhere between “didn’t want” and “can’t have (infertility/pregnancy loss).
Within that grey area, there’s a substantial number of childless women who very much wanted children but they are single & never found the right partner who would commit to building a family with them before their fertile years ended. Or they’re “childless by marriage” — they found the perfect partner, but he doesn’t want kids, or he already has children by a previous relationship and doesn’t want more.
It takes two to get pregnant (even if it’s just frozen donor sperm), and many men just don’t seem to have the same interest in “settling down” and becoming fathers. Women are always the ones being quizzed about whether they have children, and if not, why not. Men just aren’t subjected to the same social pressures. Maybe they should be.
The inequity between how eggs and sperm are treated in treatment is so infuriating. I did all this Egg Boot Camp and restrictions upon restrictions and my husband never had to do any of that. I read all these things about what he could do to improve sperm count and mobility (we had both female and male factor, and it was actually the male factor that brought is to the clinic in the first place), but our doctors pretty much poo-pooed them. We didn’t do donor sperm until the very end when we’d exhausted all the egg related things. I actually think eggs get more blame than uterus, and sometimes that’s a culprit too.
It all feels super sexist though. Especially since I know people whose doctors didn’t consider sperm as a factor and then they did sperm donor and that finally worked. I wonder how many fruitless cycles and pain and money could be saved by putting more emphasis on sperm.
I agree that men need to be given more attention around their own reproductive health, and need to take care of themselves when trying to conceive, just as women do. Most of them would have no clue that it takes sperm 90 days to mature, and anything they do in that three month time frame can affect their sperm’s viability/health. (I remember being stunned when I first learned that).
It might take two to conceive, but women’s contribution to the delivery of a healthy baby is so much more. It’s not just the health and viability of the egg (equivalent to the sperm), but the fallopian tubes and the uterus and placenta, and the 9 months in utero as well.
It’s as my (male) fertility guy said to me using a very male analogy: “Men’s bodies are like lawn-mowers. Sure, they need to be maintained to perform well, but they don’t compare to women’s bodies, which are more like a highly-tuned Ferrari.”
PS. I liked that article Sharon flagged. I think I’d read it before, but it was worth reading again.
I doubt that’s completely true—I’m sure some men with known male factor ttc stress a lot.
But, separate from that, men can father babies into their 70s and maybe even beyond. Not all, sure. But certainly most can into their 50s. No one bats an eye when a George Clooney becomes a father. So there isn’t the same dire biological clock issue. Totally unfair for sure. But I think that explains a lot of the difference.
Great article, and what a clever title for his book: GUYnecology.
This is a terrific discussion. I remember DesignMom’s twitter stream 2 years ago, and there are things in Mali’s comment that I hadn’t thought of.
I’m now reading Blue Ticket…more on the theme of women’s bodies not being wholly owned by the women themselves.