When a couple cannot have children, there has always been an assumption that the problem is with the woman. I can still clearly remember the look of pain on my grandmother’s face as she described the “horrible” tests she endured (this must have been in theThirties) – and for a “proper” woman of that era the embarrassment and humiliation must have been great.
Yet at some level, of course, there was always some knowledge, no matter how basic, that at least sometimes the man was the problem. (If he’d been through enough wives/mistresses without begetting a child this was even tacitly acknowledged.)
Even today, however, that is seldom acknowledged, so a French study about men’s declining fertility is particularly interesting:
A father aged over 40 “is a key risk factor for reproduction”. For women under 30, a male partner aged 40 or over reduced their chances of conceiving by a quarter; for women between 35 and 37, a partner over 40 reduced conception to a one-in-three possibility.
…over the past five years similar investigations in Britain and the United States have anticipated the French findings, and have also found late fatherhood to be riskier than traditionally assumed. One study found would-be fathers over 40 half as likely to make their partners pregnant as men under 25; another found fathers over 50 quadrupling the likelihood of having a child with Down’s Syndrome.
About
2 Comments