I’ve heard a lot of alarmist proclamations about how American women are becoming infertible at horrifying rates, thanks to HPV and other issues.
Alarmism aside, how big of a problem is this, really, in the US? Is there hard & fast data that gives a raw percentage of childbearing-age American women who have difficulty conceiving. How about data for men (low or nonexistent sperm counts)?
How do US infertitlity rates compare with the rest of the West? How about with the world at large?
Probably the most significant factor in medical infertility (that is, women who want to get pregnant but can’t, as a opposed to women who use contraception) is that more women in the US are delaying childbearing until their 30s or later. The longer a woman waits, the less likely she’ll be able to conceive. Female human fertility peaks in the 20’s and fall rapidly after 30. That has nothing to do with pollution, stress, or whatever - it’s just the way things are and have always been.
The birth rate in both the US and Europe is dropping overall, though, because people are choosing to have fewer children in total.
How Big a Problem is Infertility, Really?
Sucked the joy out of my marriage for 4 1/2 years, until we stopped trying to make a baby.
I don’t have a huge circle of friends, but aI guess a reasonable number my age. It feels like maybe 1 in 5 have adopted because of infertility. That’s in a group of perhaps 20 adult women.
Highly unscientific, but due to my own life experiences, I’m rather attuned to anyone who brings up Infertility or Adoption. A dear friend is in the process of adopting, having lost three pregnancies that were IVF-originated.
Cartooniverse
Aside from the ability to conceive, age 35 and older is considered to be “advanced maternal age”. If you plot the rate of various meitoic defects versus maternal age, there’s a severe incline starting at age 35, and rising sharply thereafter. This both increases the rate of embryonic-lethal defects (various autosomal monosomies and trisomies) resulting in miscarriages, and survivable chromosomal problems, such as Down’s (trisomy-21), Patau’s (trisomy-13), and Edward’s (trisomy-18) syndromes. (Of course, for the latter two, ‘survivable’ is a relative term.)
Don’t forget the decline in male fertility. The evidence not (or not primarily) on conception rates as on decline in the quality and quantity of male sperm. One conjectured cause is the hormones found in meat. I don’t know how strong the association is, but I suppose they could compare ordinary males with those who have been vegan for much of their lives. Of course, there are many confounding factors since vegans would, I think, tend to avoid many things like smoking (both tobacco and marijuana) that could have an effect.
The report found on this page says the infertility rate in 1995 was 7.1%
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/fertile.htm
This page says that in 2002, it was up to 12%