An elderly (and perhaps conservative) doctor (not an OBGYN or related specialist) recently made the statement that “Most modern infertility is caused by female promiscuity because promiscuity can lead to chronic inflaminatory pelvic disease”.
My intuition tells me this may be a biased and incredibly erroneous (not to mention judgmental) statement but I have no knowledge in this area.
Does too much sex (and sex with multiple partners which increases risk hygene issues ) really cause a significant proportion of infertility?
I’m open to correction, but my understanding is that an awful lot of infertility - male and female - has no known cause. If that’s so, I don’t think we can ever say that “most infertility is caused by X”, no matter what is. The furthest we could hope to go is to say that “most cases of infertility whose cause is known are caused by X”.
Can infertility be caused by promiscuity? Not directly, no, so far as I know. But there are certainly sexually transmitted diseases which can cause infertility and obviously the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases in any community will tend to be increased by promiscuity within that group. In general, all other things being equal, the more promiscuous you or your partner or partners are, the greater the likelihood that you will be exposed to a sexually transmitted disease.
Of course, you can be promiscuous while practising safe sex. This will mitigate the risk, but not eliminate it entirely. You’ll still be at greater risk than if you had fewer sexual partners (and practised safe sex) or no sexual partners at all.
I note that the good doctor specifies female promiscuity as the cause of “most modern infertility”. That rings alarm bells, since you could be the chastest wife imaginable, and yet have your risk of exposure increased by the promiscuous behaviour of your male spouse.
So, all in all, I’m thinking that while there is a link between sexual promiscuity and the incidence of fertility-threatening diseases, this particular statement of the situation owes more to puritanism than to epidemiology.
In the pre-antibiotic era, untreated STDs could indeed cause infertility (more likely for women than men) and men who got mumps could become infertile, although this kind of thing isn’t/wasn’t as common as most people thought it was. It WAS, however, extremely painful if a mumps infection invaded the testes. :eek:
Even though we have rampant antibiotic resistance, at least in the First World, it’s much less likely than it was a few decades ago.
p.s. People whose STDs were serious enough to make them infertile were probably chronically ill and basically disabled in other ways, like neurosyphilis or gonococcal arthritis.
I did, of course, try googling my question before posting but initially I was searching for infertility and promiscuity. I didn’t think to try looking for the name of the disease (chronic inflammatory pelvic disease) that the doctor mentioned.
So I just tried that and here is the top result that google spits out:
“PID usually results from a sexually transmitted infection, such as chlamydia or gonorrhea. It is the most common cause of female infertility and ectopic pregnancy…”
So assuming that source is credible, it seems perhaps the doctor was right after all.
I don’t know about “most”, but abortions can absolutely lead to complications which cause infertility and repeated abortions increases chances of miscarriage.
I’m sure that “most women who have abortions end up infertile” is technically true, since all women eventually end up infertile if they don’t die prematurely. Whether abortion speeds up the process is, of course, another question altogether…
So it seems that PID is most commonly, but not always, caused by early and/or multiple partner sexual activity.
The Mayo Clinic, however, indicates that PCOS is the primary cause of infertility in women and their page on PCOS does not list sexual activity as a cause.
Based on that data I would conclude that PID through sexual activity is a cause for female infertility, but not the primary cause.
PCOS is the largest cause overall but PID is a close second and is very much related to STDs and haivng multiple sexual partners significantly increases the risk of STDs. The old doc was wrong on absolute numbers but having a lot of different sex partners can absolutely be a real world risk for infertility via STD transmission.
Certainly not in my case. And you can infer whatever you like from that.
I’m guessing that has to be a scare tactic. Maybe with early twentieth century backroom coat hanger jobs, but they haven’t done it that way for forty or fifty years.
As the Mayo article quoted in the first response made clear, STD’s are a cause of blocked fallopian tubes, and blocked fallopian tubes are a cause of infertility.
What may also be relevant is that STD and associated infertility is much less common now than it was before serologic testing and antibiotic treatment.
I think Annie was trying to point out the rediculousness of the two statements together - abortion can’t lead to both infertility and 6-7 more pregnancies. She is not making a judgement on people who have abortions, but people who say stuff like that.
The CDC does not even mention pelvic inflammatory disease or STDs as major causes of infertility. It talks about age, polycystic ovarian syndrome, smoking, stress, and weight gain.
Abortions (at least, safe ones conducted by doctors) almost never lead to infertility. That’s a lie the pro-lifers pass around. A coat-hanger abortion, yes, that can.
The need for actions to have consequences, even logically inconsistent ones.
If actions didn’t have consequences, it might imply things about the nature of divine intervention and how much Jesus really cares about the affairs of humans. And we can’t have that.