Greg Bales

Just Wait Until I Get My Lasers Installed, Fertile Earth! Then I Shall Wreak Havoc!

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

From the Department of Counterintuitive Outcomes comes a sensational headline from the UK’s Daily Telegraph: “IVF ‘creating an infertility timebomb’.” The article claims that Jens Peter Ellekilde Bonde and Jørn Olsen argue in this editorial in the British Medical Journal that IVF treatments could lead to the creation of a diminished race, unable to conceive except by assisted reproduction. It is an open question, implies the Telegraph, whether fertile people can ultimately survive this onslaught of technologically enhanced subhumans!

Or not. The Telegraph‘s story is less explosive than its headline suggests; so, too, I suspect, is the editorial. In case you are unfamiliar with the argument that infertility treatments actually contribute to increased infertility, the story goes something like this: infertility is one way that mutations and other health problems are excised from the human gene pool. Infertility treatments circumvent natural selection, and in some cases even create generations that would in the past have been physically impossible—sons who carry the Y-chromosome microdeletions of the father, for example. In the future, those infertile people too will breed (with help, of course) and pass on their infertility to their own children, and so forth. On and on the infertility will spread until no man nor woman will be able to conceive naturally. The world, in other words, is destined to be like Children of Men, only the silence of the children will have been our generation’s fault for having allowed infertile people like me to breed. The scenario is not impossible, but it is unlikely. Liza Mundy entertains it in some detail in Everything Conceivable, but she eventually dismisses as far-fetched.

Meanwhile, I concur with what appears to be the researchers’ own opinion that IVF probably does not contribute much to worldwide infertility. Environmental factors are at least as responsible for increased infertility as anything. If so, looking into ways to fix the problem might do more for human and nonhuman races alike than any sort of hand-wringing over infertile couples’ rabbity ways.