Men and Infertility
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
On Saturday The Guardian carried the story of Stephen Bentley, as told to Sarfraz Manzoor, as part of its “First Person” series. Bentley had undescended testicles as a boy and is therefore infertile. He learned of his infertility the day he turned 36:
I took the news badly. I felt deeply ashamed. The revelation threatened my sense of myself as a man. Before becoming a lecturer in education, I had trained as a PE teacher and was very much into sports, regularly working out and carving out an image for myself that was pretty masculine. Being infertile made me question just how much of a man I really was. It is not something you can easily discuss with friends. The way men talk about infertility—terms such as “jaffa” (as in seedless orange) and “starting pistol” (firing blanks)—makes it a really sensitive subject to bring up.In the end, the one person I confided in was my brother. I only told my parents over Christmas. It was a very difficult conversation because I wanted to protect them from any sense of guilt that they might feel. They had asked us about children on numerous occasions because my brother has kids and they wanted to know when we would be next. Rather than talking about it I found myself internalising the guilt and the shame and the anger.
I also felt increasing jealousy towards others who were parents, and a growing sense of frustration: why me? We found we had less in common with our friends who had children—it was as though they were part of a club to which we didn’t belong. The one saving grace was that Karen didn’t blame me. Instead of driving us apart, this whole thing has brought us much closer. It was certainly a test of our marriage and there have been some dark times when I would just go quiet and withdraw.
I sympathize with Bentley’s experience in part because I experience infertility similarly; so, too, do many women—if their blogs whose blogs are any indication. I see my friends become parents and feel like a gross unfairness has been perpetrated upon me. I hear my parents complain that they have no grandchildren and see nothing but their own selfishness. I hear that my mother-in-law is saving ancient baby clothes for us and want to shake her by the shoulders until she understands that we could easily spend $50,000 and still never use those clothes. (Of course, even if K happened to get knocked up next month for free—unlikely, but not impossible—those baby clothes would never be used again, but that is neither here nor there.)
At the same time, however, there are limits to all the sympathies. Who has not noticed that
the whole area of infertility is… female-focused. Karen and I joined the Infertility Network, but in the chatrooms it was the women who were chatting; the men were silent.
It is not universally true—There are infertile men who blog, for example—but the gender disparity is so great that men might as well be silent. And that has been the case for years. For the entire decade of the 1970s, for example, Marsh and Ronner discovered only one popular magazine article about an infertile man’s experience. So: I wonder what kind of community—online or otherwise—would men need in order to be open about the infertility they experience? What kind of community would men need in order discuss infertility in general—their partner’s as well as their own?
