Silent agony of husbands haunted by MALE infertility

It’s the most disturbing of facts: sperm counts have fallen 60pc in ...blighting the lives of more me

WITH his wife Terri in floods of tears beside him, Richard Clothier felt torn. A few moments earlier they had been told the baby they so longed for was not going to happen. And the problem was down to him.

‘My whole world came crashing down,’ says Richard, 39 ‘I wanted to protect Terri but at the same time I felt terribly guilty that I had the problem. I was fit, a non-smoker and didn’t drink to excess. But tests showed my sperm count was low, the motility was poor and the morphology [shape] was poor.’

The scenario is one that is increasingly common. Last month, new research examining data on more than 43,000 men showed sperm counts in the Western world are declining at a terrifying rate.

Between 1973, when reliable records began, and 2011, Western men’s sperm concentration fell by an average of 1.4 per cent a year, an overall fall of 53 per cent in 38 years. In the span of one generation (25 years) the drop was 60 per cent.

While women are certainly choosing to have babies later in life — the average age of a firsttime mother in the UK is 29.6, a rise of almost four years in four decades — their physical fertilty rates have followed the same steady curve. Only 3 per cent of 20 to 24-year-old women will have trouble conceiving, rising to 15 per cent after the age of 35.

But men, who had always assumed they would remain fecund into middle age and beyond, are finding their fertility is falling off a cliff — often while they are comparatively young.

In the past, a third of fertility problems were said to be from the male side, a third from the female side and the rest ‘unexplained’. But experts now believe problems with sperm quality or count may account for some of the ‘unexplained’ cases.

While no specific reason has been found, it is suspected that pollution from the air and from contact with certain plastics, plus unhealthy lifestyles, is to blame. Chronic stress levels and use of antidepressants may also play a part.

SOME concerned scientists have dubbed it ‘spermageddon’ and say it could even lead to the end of the human race. ‘The data serves as a wake-up call,’ says Dr Hagai Levine, the epidemiologist behind the study that identified the decline. ‘If we do not make a drastic change to how we live and the chemicals we are exposed to, I am worried about the future.’

Another concern is that damaged sperm are having an effect already, which might help to explain the rise of conditions such as autism.

Then there is the impact, all too easy to overlook, on men’s mental health. While society has long accepted how devastating infertility is for women, men often suffer in silence, fearing to admit there is a problem. Many confess to having suicidal feelings.

This suffering is something Richard, a marketing manager from Dunstable in Bedfordshire, recognises. He and Terri, 35, a company administrator, started trying for a baby after they married in 2011. But after two years without success, their GP organised tests including semen analysis.

‘It hadn’t really occurred to me that the problem might be mine,’ says Richard. ‘The GP described my sperm as ‘a little bit lazy’ but assured us Terri would be pregnant by Christmas.’ Six months and a second opinion later, the couple were told it was far more serious. Richard’s sperm were hardly performing at all.

‘Terri took the news particularly badly,’ he says. ‘At 33, she felt time was marching on. We were advised to try fertility treatment but told that thanks to cuts, we’d only get one shot at it on the NHS.’

The news that he was infertile had a profound effect on Richard.

‘I couldn’t talk to anyone about it,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to burden Terri and the vast majority of men I knew already had children. I visited a fertility clinic open day and even the men there seemed reluctant to discuss it.’

While women struggling to conceive have often described the agony they feel at hearing friends’ ‘happy news’, in the same situation Richard felt compelled to keep his pain inside.

‘Whenever a friend revealed they were expecting, I would put on a brave face and congratulate them but the stress was intense. There were mornings driving to work when tears would be streaming down my face.

‘We did tell a few people and some were tactful but others weren’t. I had to endure jokes about “firing blanks”. One man whose partner got pregnant said “I’m just relieved to know I’m fully functional”. Comments like that haunted me. When we did a pregnancy test on Mother’s Day and it came out negative, all I could think about was how I wasn’t ‘fully functional’.

Professor Sheena Lewis, of the British Andrology Society, says the effect on men’s self-confidence can be devastating: ‘It’s a hugely emasculating issue because men are inclined to think fertility is connected to virility — which it isn’t — and that they can’t be a good lover if they can’t be a father.

‘They don’t want to talk to their partner or to male friends, and feel they must be ‘strong’ for their partner when inside they’re hurting.

‘Men are hugely lacking in support. Even within the fertility industry they are marginalised. Every test and treatment is geared towards the woman, while the man is treated as “the sperm producer”.

‘What’s more, the current semen analysis doesn’t even check for DNA damage in the sperm, so in my opinion it’s unfit for purpose. Couples need to ask for a specific test to check. That needs to change.’ Richard says Terri never made him feel he was to blame. ‘Although I felt guilty, I was lucky she never harboured any anger towards me,’ he says. ‘I’ve known other couples where that hasn’t been the case.'

TERRI says: 'Although I grieved, I never blamed Richard. The problem could so easily have been with me If anything, the experience made us closer — it’s only recently that I've discovered he was suffering so much on his own.’

Fortunately, in Richard and Terri's case, a second round of IVF - at a cost of more than £6,000 - proved a success. Their son James was born 16