Sex

This Is Probably Not All Bad News

Sperm counts are dwindling evidently:

Are today’s young men less fertile than their fathers were? It’s a controversy in the fertility field, with some experts raising the alarm over what some are calling a “sperm crisis” because they believe men’s sperm counts have been decreasing for a decade or more.

Experts here for the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual conference last week debated the issue for an entire day.

One recent analysis found that in France, the sperm concentration of men decreased by nearly one-third between 1989 and 2005. Most but not all studies from several European nations with large databases and the ability to track health records have found that over the past 15 years or so, the counts of healthy men ages 18 to 25 have significantly decreased. This comes after a prominent study from the 1990s suggested that sperm count has decreased by half over the last half-century.

Considering how human beings are consuming far more of the planet’s resources than we should be, it might not be all bad that male fertility might be declining. We can’t feed the people who are here now, much less the countless billions still to come. Perhaps this is nature making a course correction.