Second Verse, Same As the First
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
One thing had not changed: women still more often initiated treatment for infertility, and in many cases, even if it turned out that the husband had the infertility problem, women nevertheless took on the principal responsibility for it. Some women apparently went so far as to lie by claiming a defect in themselves, rather than let their husbands know their sperm counts were too low. At least some doctors apparently encouraged them to do so. As one psychologist claimed, a husband’s knowledge of his sterility would certainly “strike at the heart of his self-esteem” and might “even make [him] impotent.” (Marsh & Ronner 217, my emphasis)
Off the top of my head I can surmise a half-dozen reasons, each as good as another, why men’s fertility remained taboo throughout the twentieth century, but none of those reasons is at all satisfactory when I realize that taboo led many women to offer themselves up to be treated in substitution for their partners. How many psychologists counseled OB/GYNs and fertility specialists that men were too weak to understand they had oligo- or azoospermia? How many doctors suggested that it might be possible to compensate for a low sperm count by altering a woman’s ovulatory cycle? How many men were so taciturn that they led their partners to believe they were too delicate to know about themselves? How many men were so delicate that they could not comprehend that their masculinity was anything other than what came from between their legs?
In giving men with low sperm counts greater chance to father their own children, I expect that the availability of IVF has substantially changed the ways many doctors approach male infertility. But I do not take it as a given. When, after six months of trying to conceive, K first gave voice to her concern, it was to her gynecologist. The gynecologist listened; she asked a few questions about us, about whether I had ever fathered a child, that sort of thing. She counseled us to keep trying a while longer. “Your husband is probably okay,” she said, and then she laid out a series of steps to take if we had not conceived a child by the time a year had passed. Because we have a world-class research hospital in our city with its own reproductive endocrinology clinic, we took our infertility there when the time came, and that path brought us to where we are now. But that gynecologist’s assumption haunts me. “Your husband is probably okay,” she said, but I was not, and she had no way to know it. How many other women did she reassure in just such a way, when in fact their husbands were not okay? I wish I could say I am confident that the answer to that question is “Very few.”
