Infertility Awareness Week-Day # 5: Male Factor Infertility

Let just be honest, most of the time when couples are struggling with infertility we automatically think it's an issue with the female reproductive system. We rarely think about male factor infertility. Just like a woman whose body is failing them to either produce or carry a baby, a man can also suffer from feeling inadequate about his ability to reproduce if he has been diagnosed with an infertility problem.

Most of the time the problem lies with the sperm. Duh. But it can vary from low sperm count, to poor motility, to abnormal morphology. I'm just going to keep this real and simple. I've never broadcasted this before-but male factor infertility is one of the issues we are also dealing with when it comes to own reproductive issues. It has not prevented us from GETTING pregnant, but it could certainly be one factor leading to our recurrent miscarriages if an abnormal sperm is the one who is fertilizing the egg.

The good news is that there are ways to make sure only the normal sperm are fertilizing the eggs. The bad news is that you can only make sure of it by doing IUI or IVF with a procedure called Intra-cytoplamic Sperm Injection where they look for normal sperm under a microscope and take just one normal sperm per each available egg and manually fertilize the eggs in this manner. This is what we did when we went through our IVF cycle. This was an added cost to our cycle but it was also required by our clinic due to doing the pre-implantation genetic screening.

IF we choose to move forward with egg donation from my sister (if she does not have a translocated chromosome too), I am hoping that the clinic will allow us to do IMSI (intracytoplasmic morphologically-selected sperm injection) instead of ICSI because IMSI is an even more advanced way of ensuring the lab is using only normal sperm to fertilize the eggs, which could decrease the amount of DNA fragmentation in a developing embryo. We still have a lot of DNA fragmentation in our 4 growing embryos that we had from our last cycle...and I guess if we are really going to put our money towards another cycle-we might as well to everything we can to make sure we are producing the best quality embryos that we can. In the mean time, my husband is finally taking the vitamins he was recommended to take, so we hope that helps him to produce better quality sperm for the future.