The Male Factor

Infertility is a terrifying prospect, one that no couple wants to face. We were getting very close to K’s second birthday, which marked a full year of trying for our second child. One year and we would be clinically classified as infertile.

It’s a special kind of irony that we spent ten years actively trying not to get pregnant and here I was, twenty six and searching desperately for anything that would help us conceive before that one year mark.

It never occurred to me that it was anything other than my fault that we couldn’t get pregnant. Fault, as if there was actual blame to place on someone and not just a cruel trick of nature. I felt like it had to be something wrong with me, some way that my body was sabotaging us month after month—mine was the unpredictable body, after all. My cycle fluctuated up to six days so we couldn’t accurately predict when I was ovulating. So I started taking ovulation tests and seed cycling to make it a consistent twenty eight days. I found a supplement that was touted to regulate hormones and increase libido to boot.

Knowing that obesity is a factor in fertility I made doubly sure to stay in my “healthy weight range,” it didn’t matter that I’d been thirty pounds overweight when I got pregnant with K. I started exercising regularly because I was just on the cusp of being overweight, just barely in my “healthy” range, but more Googling showed that too much exercise when at a healthy weight might inhibit conception so I stopped. Too many carbs is inflammatory but too few can cause a stress response. Eat enough for nutrition but not so much that I gain weight. Circles, round and round, each site contradicting the last.

It took me ages to realize it, but almost every ounce of information was directed at women: what can the child-bearer do to make it happen. There is no good information for men, leaving us women with this haunting feeling that it has to be our fault. The weight of the guilt that comes with it is crushing.

Because of that guilt I began searching for support in local infertility groups, but I couldn’t post. I couldn’t ask for support from these people. So many, if not all, of these couples underwent treatments to have just one child. I’d had a child with no issue. I had no right to vent to them.

Like magic, I began to notice posts in other groups, women starting their conception journeys and asking for advice. So many people saying not to actually try, to stop thinking about it, to relax and enjoy all the sex, to stop stressing.

All I read was “your fault, your fault, your fault.”

Whether conscious or unconscious, we blame women for everything to do with children. Every one of these statements told me that I was doing something wrong, that I was stressing myself out and keeping us from getting pregnant. As if I can really control the workings of my ovaries and uterus, or the stresses of life and how my body might respond to them. But ultimately these statement focus exclusively on the female. We carry the egg and the find source, so of course it falls on us, right?

But our partners carry the seed.

When it comes to the fertility battle we seem to forget why sperm is called seed. Nothing will grow without it. You can water and nourish and give sun to a garden in perfect proportions but nothing will grow if no seeds find their way to that soil.

The focus on infertility needs to shift. While I’m certain that the resources I’ve found have proven beneficial to many, they’ve failed to give us hope. There is so little research done on the male side of infertility, the cause of roughly half of all infertility cases. Until there are more resources for men to improve their fertility, the weight of this burden lies largely on women’s shoulders.

But we need to stop blaming ourselves. We are only half of the equation.

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#malefactorinfertility #secondaryinfertility #fertilityscience