Reproduction is not just Women’s Work
A recent study by The Lancet claimed that because of falling fertility rates, the world population will begin to shrink by the end of this century. In some places, they have forecast dramatic changes, Japan’s population is set to halve for instance, with countries like Italy going from 61 million in 2017 to 28 million by the end of the century. It provoked a renewed discussion about how our evolution around having families, and the conditions shaping that are influencing peoples decisions. Some of the discussion got stuck on how women, now ‘choosing’ to have families later, are the main driver of the crisis.
On one Irish radio show, two men discussed fertility in purely single-sex terms. Women are having families later in life, they commented, and their putting careers first. Completely absent from the conversation was any mention of the choices men are making also to pursue careers, to delay becoming fathers, and the influence that this is having on their ability to conceive. What no one seemed to focus on is the fact that there is a real crisis in male fertility that continually seems to fly under the radar of mainstream discourse.
Equal responsibility
Male infertility is equally as responsible for couples struggling to conceive as is women’s. Men’s fertility has in fact halved in the last 40 years, putting it on a far more dramatic downward trend than women’s. What is more startling, but perhaps not surprising, is that no one is quite sure why. There has been little to no major research into the causes, while women’s reproductive health continues to be under the microscope as both the problem and the solution.
For years, women have been the focus of fertility. The responsibility to fix any issues, through diet, hormones, IVF and obsessing about our cycles. Some of this is just biologically defined but it has also just been driven by inherent scientific gender bias, and what may have seemed like the easiest and obvious route. But what has been a one-sided conversation for decades is actually flying in the face of what we now know. Men it appears, also have a biological clock, and it has a large part to play in the couples conceiving.
What any studies have found is that the decline in male fertility, a trend that is largely confined to the West, is greatly affected by age, as well as health and diet. Yet men still languish under the misnomer that they can go on producing children, at will, for most of their lives. The real truth is the male fertility landscape is changing, shifting beneath men’s feet with little awareness as to what is really going on.
Prejudices
Yet the old prejudices and ignorance persist. If you are in any doubt as to the continued skewed messaging around this towards women, then a fertility campaign ran a few years ago highlights just how bias the approach still is. In 2016, the Italian government, who incidentally offer €800 cash bonus as an incentive to get pregnant, ran a publicity campaign in celebration of ‘Fertility Day’ picturing a young woman holding an hourglass, her other hand resting against her lower abdomen with the slogan, “Beauty knows no age. Fertility does.”
The fact that an Italian government is capable of some sexist messaging is perhaps not shocking in itself but it shone a spotlight on the continued pervasive underlying attitude towards whose responsibility fertility is. Fertility articles for instance often still only appear in women’s sections in papers or are the taglines used to sell women’s magazines. In 2014, after years of research sociologist, ethnographer, and writer Dr Liberty Barnes published Conceiving Masculinity, where she found that while male infertility is as prevalent as female infertility it’s almost invisible in our society. “Most cases of male infertility are referred to IVF clinics,” she commented, “a process in which women bear the brunt. For many, male infertility is repaired in female bodies.”
Barnes spent over 100 hours observing doctors in five different clinics across the US. She interviewed many of the couples involved separately. Most infertile men, she found, even those who didn’t see themselves as infertile were able to ‘intellectually reframe’ their infertility issues as a medical condition somehow separate from themselves. Even the imagery used was all designed to ‘other’ the condition, with the terminology like the plumbing not being in order, and imagery of factories, bridges, engines being used to disguise the diagnosis.
The extraordinary lack of discussion around men’s health and fertility doesn’t, in fact, serve anyone.
“Men are afraid to come forward with any issues because of the outdated ideas around masculinity and virility that still pervades, while women continue to be stigmatised for a whole societal and physiological shift that is not theirs to fix.“
It also allows women to suffer under the misinformation that somehow if that their fertility is completely hardwired to their age, something that is a cause of real stress for women who want to get pregnant as they approach midlife, and not also perhaps the age of their partner. “We’ve got to help society move past archaic ideas that reproduction is women’s work,” says Barnes. That sounds like a poster campaign I can actually get behind.
Jessie Collins, July 2020.
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