BEING unable to conceive despite frequent, unprotected sexual intercourse for at least a year or more may be concerning. A man’s incapacity to inpregnant a woman can be stressful and distressing for both. Male infertility is more likely if there has been previous prostate inflammation or genital infection.
Male infertility is just as frequent as female infertility, and it can have a variety of causes. It could be caused by insufficient sperm production or a lack of healthy sperm. It can be inherited or acquired. To impregnate a woman, a man needs to produce healthy sperm that is carried into the semen. The sperm must be shaped correctly and able to move. If the movement or shape is abnormal, the sperm may not be able to reach or penetrate the egg.
Take Anthony and his wife Victoria, both in their 30s and healthy, so their infertility puzzled them. They struggled with infertility for six years before launching a podcast about their experience. “We wanted to document it, because we found there were no real resources out there. Once we started talking about it, we heard from a lot of people who were also going through it, or had been through it,” said Anthony.
The podcast begins during their fourth round of IVF treatment. Anthony says he felt like being “the rock” in the situation where a fertilized egg is implanted in the womb. But whatever feelings he might have had felt was kind of minor given to what Victoria was going through. Anthony couldn’t really be too emotional or too distressed about it, he had to be there for her. He felt a sense of powerlessness, and he did his best to support his wife by staying on top of what he could tackle: Appointment times, terminology and administering her hormonal injections. Luckily, Victoria has a needle phobia, so he quickly became a nurse, and that was a really small part that he could play to help.
Holidays and gatherings with friends and their children were some of the most challenging moments. They intended to release the podcast regardless of the outcome of their fertility journey. Fortunately, Victoria was finally able to conceive through IVF, at the seventh IVF round. Several weeks after the birth of their first child, they had a spontaneous, natural pregnancy which resulted in the birth of their second child.
Anthony is conscious that this isn’t the case for everyone. A lot of the feedback on the podcast was from people who had been through 10 or more rounds of IVF, used donor sperm, tried surrogacy, and still didn’t have a baby.
Anthony and Victoria were lucky, but with every blood test, were prepared for the worst. It wouldn’t be the end of the world – they’d get along, travel more – but it’s not the world that they were hoping for.
While men don’t experience nearly the same external “pressure, pressure, pressure” women do when it comes to reproduction, there is a certain primal urge. Most male patients often feel extra guilt while trying to conceive. They wish they could take the treatment on themselves, “Like, ‘Give me the needles, give me the procedure,’ but that’s just not how the biology works.” Male-factor infertility, the sperm side of the equation, accounts for about a third to half of the cases.
Infertility is on the rise, there’s good evidence that decade over decade, general sperm quality has gone down, probably from exposure to pollution or endocrine disrupters. Many couples are often “shocked” when they end up in a fertility doctor’s office and find out they have an issue with sperm quality. While sexual dysfunction is usually picked up, since if you don’t ejaculate, you know you don’t have a chance of impregnating a woman through intercourse, with sperm, you don’t know unless you check. If a man has had a vasectomy, he can still produce semen, but there are no sperms present which are only visible on a microscopic level.
