How I started a family despite being told I was infertile
Richard Clothier on how he broke the taboo around low sperm counts
My wife, Terri, and I began trying for a baby after we got married. I was 34 and she was 29; we were both healthy, non-smokers, fit and rarely drank. We didn’t expect to have any problems, but we couldn’t conceive. After a year and a half of trying, we went to the doctor to see if there were any underlying issues. It didn’t take long to get the results.
I was told that I had poor motility, which means my sperm don’t always move forward freely; poor morphology (shape); and a low sperm count. New research shows I am not alone in this. Sperm counts
‘I had to deal with people joking about firing blanks’
in men across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand have halved in less than 40 years, with much of it linked to our lifestyles, from stress and diet to pesticides and plastics.
For me, the news came as a total shock. I’d always been fit and healthy – and it was awful when we were told that it was highly unlikely we’d be able to conceive naturally. I felt so guilty that I couldn’t “come up with the goods”, as it were, and I had to try to deal with that while helping my wife. I focused entirely on her, and closed off the idea of talking about my feelings to people who had no personal experience of infertility.
We were advised to try IVF, but because of ongoing funding cuts in Bedfordshire, where we live, we were told only one cycle would be available to us on the NHS. We tried everything to make it work. I started running more, virtually stopped drinking alcohol, and began including seeds, nuts, alfalfa sprouts and fish oil supplements in my diet. But after a year, the cycle hadn’t worked. That took its toll emotionally, because the world around us didn’t stop; everyone else seemed to be getting pregnant. Some were subtle, and others weren’t. I had to deal with people joking about firing blanks, and one whose partner got pregnant and said: “Ah, at least I know it still works.”
Most of them didn’t know what I was going through, but one man did. I congratulated him when his partner became pregnant, and he said: “I’m just relieved to know I’m fully functional.” It didn’t even cross his mind that his words wouldn’t be well received, but it haunted me. When we finished the cycle last year and did a pregnancy test on Mother’s Day that was negative, all I could think about were his words, and how I wasn’t “fully functional”.
It deeply affected Terri and me on an emotional level, but it never shook our relationship. At no point did she feel resentment towards me. She saw the infertility as our problem, as something we had to deal with together. The cause of it was totally irrelevant to her.
But I couldn’t move past the stigma. I barely told anyone about it. The only reason I can now speak openly is because I chose to open up, last year, when there was talk in Bedfordshire of removing IVF treatments on the NHS altogether. I felt that the only reason clinical commissioning groups (CCGS) could make such a damaging decision was because of the taboo surrounding infertility, so I chose to share my story – and will again do so at the Fertility Show (fertilityshow.co.uk) in November.
I hope that my decision to speak out, and my subsequent campaigning, contributed to the CCG changing its mind and continuing to provide Nhs-funded IVF treatment in the county. But sharing my story also removed the shame around my infertility. I felt like a burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I hope that other men will find the same relief in telling their stories – particularly as awareness is being raised about the effect of unhealthy lifestyle choices.
Our infertility journey had a happy ending. After the failed NHS cycle, we went private and had one more attempt at a cost of around £6,200. This time it worked, and our son James was born in April.
There will be people reading this who are going through what we did, and they won’t always want to hear happy stories. I know how that feels. The only way I can articulate how it felt to get that positive pregnancy result is to say, in that one moment, all the dark and emotionally tough moments were a small price to pay. When I look at James today, I know that everything we’ve been through has been worth it.