Does a woman’s body attack sperm as an invader?
I’m fairly certain the answer to that would be yes.
The first thing I thought of was the game Space Invader.
there can be only one. (left)
Yes. I don’t have a source right now but I’m pretty sure, as I’ve heard it, and learned about it a few years ago.
I have a friend who had five miscarriages (and has two healthy children too, thank goodness) as a result of the proteins in her husband’s sperm being recognised by her body as alien, and her immune system rejecting the embryo. She miscarried consitently at about 10 weeks. The two times she got through that barrier, the babies went to term normally.
Unfortunately this happened in Japan to a Japanese friend, and my language skills are not up to medical terms! So while I understood the above explanation, I do not know the term for it so can’t look it up to translate…
But it does seem to happen - if not right away as sperm, soon after the embryo begins to develop.
Hokkaido : The Placenta is supposed to secrete some sorta hormone that supresses the immune system withen it, and thus protecting the baby. It sounds like your friend might not be secreting that hormone correctly. Might I suggest a specialist?
Try looking under “anti-sperm antibodies”.
Yeah, they do. I saw a show on reproduction on the Learning channel, and one interesting microscope shot they had was a macrophage (I believe) gobbling up a sperm cell.
Also I’ve heard that sperm from different men will ‘fight’ each other if they encounter one another. If you combined the semen from 2 different men and looked at the results in a microscope, I’m imagining that you’d probably see a single-celled war going on.