Good afternoon or good day, everyone. This is Dr. Bill Petok. I'm a psychologist in Baltimore, Maryland, and it is my pleasure to have Dr. Brennan Peterson with us today for this episode of SART Fertility Experts.
Dr. Peterson is a professor in the Department of Marriage and Family Therapy at Chapman University, where he's taught graduate and courses for over 20 years. In addition, he's a licensed marriage and family therapist. His research is involved with the mental health implications of infertility, and he's published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters.
Furthermore, he's an international authority. Dr. Peterson has presented his work in the United States, Israel, Canada, Europe, China, Hong Kong, and Australia. And most importantly, a significant component of his research is the male portion of infertility, and that's what we'll be focusing on in our conversation today.
First of all, thank you for joining us. Absolutely, Bill. It's been great to be with you.
Thank you for having me. Sure. So, let's start with the basics.
How is it that men react to an infertility of diagnosis, and why do they have reactions like they do? That's a pretty big question, so I'll leave it to you to focus it a little bit for us. I think the first reaction that people have is shock and a sense of, how did this even happen? It's not something that's usually on people's radar at all. So, having a child is really not viewed as a question of when, but if.
And so, if someone is actively trying to have a child, there's just a belief that that's going to happen. So, once they experience that shock and disbelief, I think it starts to morph into other reactions. A lot of these reactions are, kind of, go under the surface and are hidden because many people don't talk about male infertility.
It's not in the public consciousness as much. It's not in the media. Whenever fertility issues are discussed, it's usually discussed about women, and we know that rates between men and women are equal.
So, men can oftentimes experience a sense of inadequacy, a sense of loss, a sense of difficulty being open with others about it, and it can even get to the point where people start to question the meaning of their lives, the purpose of their lives, the values of fairness in life, which can lead to a lot of anxiety. It can lead to depression. It can lead to a lot of just psychological distress where people are in an unfamiliar territory.
They're in a place that they never expected to be. That's highly significant, given that most of us assume that we'll grow up, figure out what we want to do with our lives, find someone to be with as a partner, and have a family. Yeah.
Another way to look at it is from, like, a developmental perspective, a life cycle perspective, that there are these stages of life which people commonly go through, and parenthood is one of those stages that many people go through, and most people, when surveyed, will say that they do desire to be a parent. So, when you have this unexpected interruption into your life like that, and you've been living a certain way and making decisions and planning, and people around you are having children and families asking you about if you're going to have children, it's just such an unexpected event that it prevents this development from taking place. It's an interruption in someone's development.
It's a massive detour for people. You know, you mentioned that, you know, everyone around you is having children, and all of a sudden you're not. That must be incredibly difficult for—it's got to be difficult for anybody.
I suspect it's even more difficult for men to know how to deal with that. I think it is really difficult for men to know what to do with it. It's very common for both partners to really struggle with that issue of childhood friends having children, and for women, that's very, very difficult, is that they're experiencing this significant, again, interruption in their life, and people around them are having children, and they have a hard time and struggle with even maintaining those relationships and being happy for people because it's so painful.
For men, I think it's a little bit different, where men just don't really have a script on how to talk about it. They don't know what to say about it, and it can really cut at the heart of masculinity for them, which is a sense of being strong and sense of being adequate, and that is a key component to, I think, men's reactions, is how masculinity is contextualized in society and in culture. I would think also, given what you've said, that there's this interaction between reproducing and sexual behavior, and that somehow, if you're not able to reproduce, that means something about your sexuality.
It's common for men to experience a lot of sexual inadequacy and feeling they're not enough, and what can happen in a relationship is that the sexual relationship, which has been an asset, which has been a strength, becomes a liability at that point. It becomes a stressor because pregnancy and fertility treatments focus so much around conception and sex that then it can become a task. It can become something that they're required to do at a certain time when ovulation is occurring, and it can become very challenging for men.
It can be linked with performance. It can be linked with just a loss of spontaneity and a loss of connection to a partner. Yeah, there's an old book which you and I both remember, but some of our listeners may not, The Joy of Sex, and it sounds like it now becomes the job of sex.
Absolutely, which is really difficult for people, and then it takes away that support out of the relationship because now it becomes a stressor, and so the relationship can become more strained as well. Right, and something which has been positive and frequently is an important component of drawing people together now, and a feeling of success in joining now becomes a failure. Yeah, yeah.
What do we know about the feelings of shame and stigma that I would imagine both women and men experience, and because we're focused on men, what do we know about that? Yeah, it's a really good question. We did a research study recently about this, and part of this came from these studies that have found that masculinity and stigma have been linked with depression in men, have been linked with isolation, have been linked with secrecy, and there have been only a handful of studies done, and so we really wanted to look more at the details of the relationships between these variables. We know that stigma is present, so stigma is a sense of feeling different than.
It's a sense of feeling personal inadequacy or personal devaluation, and also a sense of a fear of public disapproval, that you're different from a group in some way. So stigma, we know, is something that will interrupt people's development because it then leads them to feel different from someone else, to withdraw, to become out of the normal social circles, and they begin to feel somewhat marginalized and alone. So with men infertility, that's, it's already, there's this high level of feeling somewhat ill-prepared to know how to talk about it, to know how to share it with other people.
That even comes from most commonly in societies where men are not as well-versed in sharing emotions and sharing their feelings with people. Then you add this on, and men are really at a loss. So it's something that feels really isolating for people, and it feels like it kind of moves people away and leads them feeling cut off.
What's your sense of why men don't have a good idea about how to talk about how they feel? Is that something that we just don't get taught, or we don't absorb, or that women have an advantage there? It's such a good question. I think it's an age-old question, and a lot of it has to do with socialization and the peer groups in which we're raised, and a lot of it has to do generationally as well. I think you may be seeing a difference in younger generations coming up in terms of openness and such, but it's also different in the way that it's more through technology.
So the face-to-face is somewhat limited. But I think there's this, there's this sense of difficulty because boys, when they're raised, they don't really feel, when they share with other boys about something that's a struggle, there's just a culture of shame around that, like personal weakness. And that's something that then people begin to learn.
You know, boys learn at a very young age that they don't talk about that because they'll get made fun of, they'll get razzed by their friends, and then it begins, you know, it can be very mild, like just mild teasing to severe bullying. So I think there's this culture where it's just not as acceptable to do that. For men, it's oftentimes a bind because once they get into adulthood and they get into relationships, and like in heterosexual couples, if a female partner wants them to be more expressive, wants them to be more communicative, they oftentimes struggle with that because they've spent most of their life learning how to shield those emotions and be somewhat defensive about it and not be clear about it.
So I think it can stem from that, a lot of socialization. There's an old Homer Simpson meme that I've seen that says, Homer says, well, men have feelings like I'm hungry. Yes, exactly.
So that being emotional is feminized, I guess. And most men want to be masculine, that's what we're taught. And honestly, Bill, that's where this study came from was this sense of, okay, masculinity and strength, and is it changing? Are people redefining masculinity in new ways? Because we know that it is somewhat, we know that men are more involved in childcare, we know that men are more involved in having more egalitarian relationships with their partners.
So that's a big improvement. And that's, that's really great. But we also know that there's a sense of men don't have that really ability to, like, many times know how to deal with something so disruptive in their lives, and then open up to someone about that or share with someone about that there.
You know, there's, there's men are like two and a half times less likely to go to the doctor United States, they don't want to have verbal and face to face interactions, oftentimes with problems like this, they want to prefer like written information. But it's really interesting is that, given that they will prefer to have information about fertility issues from medical doctors and nurses and fertility staff, much more than a mental health professional. So mental health professionals really are the last place that men want to end up to say, like, you know, here I am struggling with this, that that seems like another failure in a way that now I've got to go talk to someone else about it.
Right? I have to go see the shrink. Yeah, and have to as opposed to want to or would find some benefit in that, right? Well, that presents an interesting problem. You've done a lot of research.
Have you found that it was easy to recruit men for studies? No, it's not. It's, it's, it's one of the biggest challenges we've faced. And it's written about quite often.
And I really got a firsthand perspective of this two years ago, when we did this recruitment for the study, and we, we were only going to recruit men. And we ended up our sample was just so small. And we also had their partners were completing the surveys we had, we opened it up to women as well, because we wanted both.
And what we found was, it was kind of a five to one ratio, we had almost 500 women and about almost 100 men. Now, that's actually in the infertility literature, it's pretty good to get that many men. But still, with a lot of targeted approaches, it was just very, very, very difficult.
And then we've done a longitudinal study and follow up. And so of those 500 women, we had about 120 in our sample, and only like 20 of the men. So you can see that that's real challenge where you can get good follow up data with those numbers.
Yeah, those numbers aren't big enough to make any reasonable conclusions from them. Right. So why do you think it is that men aren't more aware of their own fertility, and the potential that it could be impaired? Yeah, I think I think part of that goes back to this, in the public sphere in a media, it's just never really addressed.
You don't you know, you don't see a television show about male fertility. It's really uncommon. I did see one on Netflix, which which was an Australian show that really addressed it well, which was excellent.
But in general, it's it's not and so there's just, you know, there's there's a lack of discussion about it. And it's also for for female and female infertility as well. There's also a lack of awareness about that.
So it's not as just if it's only men, it's really men and women really, there's we've done studies on fertility awareness, and both men and women are really unaware of their own fertility potential or the windows of fertility, the success rates of IVF, all those things are pretty mysterious to people. And there's just not a lot of good information about them. So I would think that women would have a leg up because they do have a monthly period of which if somebody is explaining to them what that's all about, it has to do with reproductive health.
Men don't have anything comparable. Right. And I guess the other thing that strikes me is that women when they're pregnant, it's obvious.
But when a man has impregnated somebody, no one knows. Right. I think those are both really good explanations as well.
So we've talked a little bit about how we researched men's experiences. And it sounds like what you did in this most recent study was a questionnaire and interview kind of research. Yes.
Okay. What have we found out about how men get their information about infertility best? What kind of resources are most useful for them? So when they go to the doctor, having written information or online information is oftentimes the most preferred for them. When they need information about support, they're much less likely to go to say a face-to-face group where six other men with infertility are experiencing the same thing.
But one of the things which has been a discovery, which has been really unique, has been online discussion boards and men's use of online resources to provide and receive support. And this is really important because in the studies, although it's difficult to get men, there have been studies where men participate. But one of the things that also happens is once you get them, they tend to under-report what they're experiencing.
And a lot of that reason is what we've already talked about in terms of that socialization. So one of the things they find in the online discussion boards, men can go in there and post what's really happening to them. And we started to discover that men's reactions psychologically are very much on par with women as well.
So the sense of isolation, the sense of depression, the sense of exclusion, the sense of helplessness, the loss of potential fatherhood, the loss of meaning, those things come very clear when they're written down and people are doing that. Now, there's a couple of reasons for that. Interviews, like the anonymity of being behind a keyboard is a powerful thing.
Now, that can be for good and bad, obviously. But one of the good parts about that is it can allow a man to say, I really feel like I'm failing my partner. I really feel like a failure as a husband.
That's much easier to do than in person for a man. And then there's also this geographic variability where you can get people in different countries. And infertility is a global problem.
It's a global issue. Up to 80 million people are diagnosed with infertility. And the rates of male infertility are equal to the rates of female infertility.
So that's very powerful to de-stigmatize it as well as to say, there's people that are posting in Japan. There's people in Africa. There's people in Australia.
There's people in Europe. There's people all over the globe, South America, who are posting and experiencing this. And it's very common to have a lot of similar reactions.
There's always going to be culture-bound reactions, which is really important. The way in which a culture conceptualizes parenthood and masculinity is going to contextualize people's reactions. But there's also these core universal reactions that people have, which are those ideas of like, and this is for people who want to have a child.
It's not for people who like child-free couples. They're not in this group because it's not a desire. But for people who really want to have that child, they're going to experience that sense of loss, that sense of anxiety about the future, that sense of questioning and isolation.
So I guess what that research is saying is that a guy can figuratively walk into the room. Nobody sees his face. Nobody knows his name because he can use a handle and he can say whatever he wants.
Yes. And there's power in that because they can also have a lot of autonomy on how much to participate. So they could just read other people's responses and no one even knows that they've been there.
So they're getting information that way. Then they could write responses and ask questions to people to get more direct information for them particularly. But another really powerful way is once men have been doing that for a while, then they become the providers of support for the people asking the questions.
So they commonly say, hey, five months ago, I was right where you are. It was really stressful and difficult. Hang in there.
It's going to get better. So that's a really powerful way is then you start to create these networks where men do have support from other people and they can receive the benefits of that. With such a powerful tool, are there a significant number of these outlets that men can access? You know, I don't know like the number of them that are out there and I doubt that.
I mean, there's always different groups. There's like Facebook discussion groups. And I think if people dig enough, they can find support like that.
I was thinking of it in terms of, you know, Resolve exists, the National Repertility Support Network. But my look at Resolve is that they're more, they provide more, women utilize their services more than men do. So they provide services that are female focused.
Yes. One of the great resources that's out there right now is a group called Uniquely Knitted. And they're out of Orange, California, where Chapman University is.
And they're a non-profit organization that works with and provides process groups to couples going through infertility. So it's for men and women. It's for anyone, really.
You could be an individual who does it. Give the name of the group again. Uniquely.
It's called Uniquely Knitted. Knitted. Okay.
As in I knitted a sweater. Yes. As in we're all kind of bound together through this unique experience of infertility.
And this is a powerful, powerful group that connects people together through a community. And it provides therapist-led support groups. And they're also subsidized for people.
So they're affordable. And they're global. So someone from Australia can sign up and take these courses.
And they're not courses. They're process groups. So they are in them for six weeks.
And they're at a very reduced rate. It's probably like about 10% of what people would normally pay for therapy services. Well, that's very significant.
It's very significant. So access is high. And it's just a fantastic group.
A man named Doug Brown and his wife started this program. And they went through their own fertility challenges and have just become incredible advocates for the fertility community. So that's something like that, where it's a little bit of a mix.
It can be like an online group that is a small amount of group. But you still have some autonomy. And you could express the desire to be seen with men only.
And they have a great group for men. That's a very good resource. I'll have to add that to the list of what I provide my patients.
You've been working both as a researcher and as a clinician. So you have a unique view. What is your take on men's experiences when they do seek? Well, let's start with the medical treatment.
I mean, how do men experience the medical treatment component of this? Because if I read the literature properly, going to see a urologist or an andrologist first is usually not the course of action. You're usually, couples usually going to reproductive endocrinologist when they have the diagnosis. Yeah, I think the experience of working with the medical professionals can be a little jarring for people.
It can be an experience where they feel somewhat on the periphery. There's, let's say that they do the fertility tests. And if it's male factor in fertility, then their partner, if it's a heterosexual couple, their partner is likely still going to be the focus of the fertility treatments.
So oftentimes men go in and they don't know how to interact with the staff. They feel somewhat lost. There are studies that basically find that men say, I feel like I was on the periphery.
I didn't know I even had a voice in this. I didn't want to overstep bounds. I feel a sense of helplessness because this is my problem.
And my partner is the one who is having to undergo all of this. And they feel a lot of guilt, a lot about that. So they can feel that guilt and they can feel that shame and that sense of like failure of being a partner who's protecting their partner.
That's a big thing we find in the research is that men want to fulfill a role and they want to be strong for their partner. But oftentimes now it's like, well, I'm the one causing my partner pain and I don't know how to help. And that's a, that's a really difficult bind for men to find themselves in.
Yeah. I would expect given that frequently we are in the role of being problem solvers and now here's a problem for which we don't have a solution. Right.
That's debilitating. Absolutely. And sometimes with infertility and many times there are things that can be done medically, but there aren't ways you can control the outcome.
And that's oftentimes a difficult experience for people, particularly if someone's like a high achieving person and they've been able to set high goals for themselves and they achieve them through hard work. Yeah. People can't become pregnant through working harder.
So it's challenging in that way as well. So men want information from medical providers. They're reluctant to go into psychotherapy or, or, or counseling, let's make it less aversive.
Yes. Right. Right.
Do men benefit from it when they, when they actually pull the trigger and say, okay, I'm going to go talk to somebody about this because I'm having a hard time with it. It's another variable we looked at in our study, which is about this concept of openness. There was a study in 2017 out of Italy by a researcher, Alessandra Bavor, and she found that, that men who had male factor infertility, who shared their infertility struggles with others compared to men who didn't, that sharing was predictive of less depression, not the diagnosis.
A lot of times it's always been seen as that male factor infertility is the issue that leads to depression in men. Yeah. Where this study really found that it was really moderated by what they did with that.
So men who shared it with others and who talked about it, their depression levels actually went down and men who kept it a secret, didn't talk about it, their depression levels went higher. So what we did in our study is we, we looked at that relationship more closely and we found that men who had higher stigma and higher infertility related like criticism, self-criticism and judgment and internalized shame about it, had higher depressive symptoms. And it was really a powerful finding.
And then we looked at the inverse, which was what about if you could increase openness with other people, openness in the sense of the things which we've been talking about where it contrasts with masculinity, that traditional sense of like, of like, okay, being strong is being closed. I'm not going to feel the emotions and I'm not going to discuss the emotions. So the opposite would be, I'm going to allow myself to have some of these emotions and I'm going to share them with other people.
What we found was that that openness led to significantly lower depressive symptoms. And that was a really powerful finding because we would think that, you know, you kind of assume that, but when we found it in the research, it was one of the most powerful effects. It was the most clear finding from the entire study is that the sense of being open with others led to decreased depression.
So in essence, what you're saying is it's a different kind of strength, the strength that allows you to share how you feel because you feel comfortable enough to do that, or something pushes you to, okay, I'm going to do this because I think I'm going to explode otherwise or something like that. Yeah. That's a perfect way to view it is that that's the, that's the way to revolutionize the view of masculinity is that it is strength.
It's just a different type of strength. Right. Being able to share those emotions with other people can be very, very powerful.
So there's a couple of things that we found is that like, why would that be like, why would sharing decrease depression? We also found that it increased people's sense of purpose and meaning in life, which was an incredibly powerful predictor. So there were two things you're finding that you, you have two variables. One is a very positive variable.
That's something that they gain, which is they get increased meaning, increased presence of meaning in life. The other is a variable. That's an unwanted variable.
It's a depression. It's a symptom and you want lower. So it went both ways.
It went in the expected directions. The openness increased the meaning, the openness decreased the depression. One of the ways it can do this is that that process of storytelling is associated with meaning creation and is associated with connection with other people.
Right. And it's really, it's a relational process, right? Like organizing a story, this confusing story, right? I never thought I would be here at, here's what we had to do that, getting a coherent narrative about that and sharing it with other people is just part of what we do as human beings. You know, we're just so social.
We're always talking, we're always sharing it, but it's about like, what are we sharing? So we're all, you know, you, we go to the restaurant and everyone's talking because everyone's sharing and everyone's telling stories, but it's about what are we talking about? Right. So when men can access that ability to talk about what they're experiencing with other people, that can really result in a lot of positive outcomes. More so than I was thrilled because my team won or I felt bad because I didn't get that job.
Right. Right. Absolutely.
It sounds like a guy really needs to be comfortable with vulnerability. Yeah. And there's an important caveat to that too, is that not all openness is good openness because you may be open with people who don't understand and who, and who minimize it, which leads people to feel more hurt.
So, so it's really important that there was a really good study that came out of Brazil that found that while openness could lead to emotional intimacy with people and supportive connections, it also was associated with perceived judgment, a lack of understanding and strained relationships with people. So when a couple chooses to limit disclosure, that can actually be a protective factor for them as opposed to a barrier to support. So the real key is how do we get to open disclosures that lead to supportive responses? There's a dyadic relationship there.
So it's not just men needs to be more vulnerable. Men need to talk more, but it's, they need to find people who are going to be supportive and understanding it. And that can be a challenge, but if they can find those people, a good trusted friend, a good trusted family member, someone other than their partner, then that can be really powerful.
So it's important to be open with people you can trust with your openness. And if you have a number of relationships that are significant outside of your marriage or your partner, and I'm assuming better if it's another man, or am I missing I don't know what, we haven't looked at that, but I think, I don't know if the gender of the other person matters as much as what I would think it would matter more on if they're a supportive, trusted person. But I think having another man talking about that can be powerful for sure, because it would be, especially if it's a man who could provide support and understanding other than just like, oh, you know, thanks for talking about like someone who feels like a trusted friend.
Yeah, somebody who's willing to say, boy, that sounds like it must really be difficult. Yeah. You know, and even ask, how are you managing? Absolutely.
Yeah. Okay. One of the things we haven't talked about is that, you know, there are so many interventions for women who have fertility problems, there can be changes in hormone strategies, there can be surgeries, there are a limited number of procedures for men, certainly in our sperm extraction procedures, testicular surgery, things like that, which make most men cringe.
And then the next step, if that doesn't work, if you can't find viable sperm, then one choice would be to use a donor. And I know that in your years of work, you've bumped into men who have made that choice, but probably have struggled with making it. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely.
Men who use donor insemination, particularly in heterosexual couples, they are going to, they oftentimes report that it's the most challenging part of the whole infertility experience. So part of it comes because they lose that genetic link with a child. Sure.
And they can feel that sense of stigma and shame even more, even more so to a much greater degree. So it's now, now it's not that I couldn't, you know, we had to go through fertility treatments, I couldn't, you know, have a child on my own. But now it's, well, my wife had a child, but it's not even mine.
You know, it's, it's, it's someone else's really like biologically. So that can be a thing that men really struggle with is that what does that mean? What does that mean for them in their, in terms of, again, masculinity in terms of their role? Like, does it somehow mean that there's something wrong with them that there's the shame of being defective, or they haven't been able to provide something for their partner? Right. So when I talk with men who are struggling with that, I talk about the difference between being a genetic parent and being a experiential parent.
What I've been fond of saying is that parenting is what starts after the child leaves the womb. Yeah, yeah. It goes on for the rest of the child's life, you're, you're doing the work of parenting.
And true, there's a loss of a biological connection, genetic connection. But the work of parenting, the influence that you bring is going to be there. And I think one of the most important things about that is that men who are successful in adapting make that shift, they change in a cognitive way, they change the way that in which they view it, it's, it's going to be very likely that they struggle with that initially.
But if they can shift their perspective to say, okay, what does it mean? Like, okay, so I'm not the biological father. So can I still have a meaningful relationship with this child? Can I still be a parent to this child, when when men can move towards that and accept that. And they can also decrease the stigma and secrecy about being a donor, right, that sense of shame, like, okay, what it means that I'm, and they can embrace it and accept it.
And they don't, again, they don't need to tell everybody that this is donor can donor conceived child, but, but they can tell trusted people, and they can, and people can be very supportive of that. But it starts with the person being able to accept it themselves. And to say, like, this was a challenge, this was hard for me, but I got to a point where it's, it's okay, right? I can be a loving father to this to my child, I can be a loving parent.
And that's, that's a corner that people can turn is really predictive of psychological health. And I guess the other half of that is, and that my child can be a loving child to me. Because how do we create those feelings and behaviors in our children? We model them? Yeah, you know, if I, if I treat you the way I would want to be treated as a child, then you're likely connect with me in ways that are more, perhaps more important than the genetic connection.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, this is all fascinating, because we don't hear enough about this.
And I wonder if there are any thoughts that you think would be important for men who are listening to this and maybe trying to make a decision about do they talk? Do they use a donor? Do they do they share this with anyone that would be important for them to know? I think part of the openness and the sharing is not really just advice seeking, because everyone has different opinions on what people should do. Yes. And I think that advice seeking tends to be pretty, pretty short sighted and unhelpful most of the time, someone says, Well, you should do this, or you should do that.
So if someone's really struggling with sharing, sometimes advice seeking can be what where, where people want to start, because it's a little less risky. But I would say to move away from just seeking advice and more to sharing what's happening with someone. So finding, you know, I could think in men's in their social networks, we typically have people and friends that we've lost contact with maybe friends from when you were in high school friends from when you were in college, if you if you did that friends from an earlier job that you moved away.
And when I work with men, oftentimes, they if they can tap into those friendships, again, reopen them. Usually the person on the other end is more than happy to open up that relationship to because they're in a situation probably where they have a underdeveloped social network, and they want good friends too, but they they lost contact. So I think that's a really powerful way is it find, find friends that you trust, whether whether they're currently in your sphere, or from the past, and just talk about just what it's like, what what what the experience has been like, you don't need to go into all of the most vulnerable disclosures if you don't want to, but just a sense of like, this is this is harder than I thought this is kind of a struggle and just starting there.
And then I think the secondary point is that they can expand their networks through those online discussion boards, like finding a place to just go and read what other men have written, ask questions about for other men. And then those those are two great starting points that can really be, I think, powerful and change in the direction for people. I like that notion of, you know, the anonymity of the boards, other people have been down this course, before you, you're not alone.
And if you keep isolated, then you, you feel like you're the only one, which, of course, is not true. I read a statistic recently that last year, there's certain data on, well, I guess they probably validated data since then. But in 2022, there were 7500 and some odd babies born from donor sperm.
And that doesn't count IUI, that's only through IVF. That's a lot of babies, where somebody decided, I really want a child, this is going to be the best path for me to go forward. I'm going to use a donor, because that's what we want to do.
Yeah. Okay. I think one thing that medical professionals can do as well as if there's anyone that's listening that's in the medical office, like providing that sense of information, giving men resources like that.
So when they have the information about what you might expect in fertility treatments, having information about online discussion boards, here are a couple of places you can go to receive information, you can post information, post questions and receive information from other men. So when they normalize it, and they give it to them, then they don't have to go searching for it. And it doesn't have to be more desperation.
It's like, oh, the doctors told me this might be good, and I'm going to try it out. Well, I guess the other side of it is don't be afraid to ask your medical team for information that will be useful to you. Because they will be able to find it maybe easier than you will.
Don't be afraid to at least ask that question, I guess would be important. Okay. Well, thank you so much.
This has been very enlightening. And I know our listeners will find it incredibly useful. Your expertise, your knowledge, and your experience has been a real advantage for our listeners.
Thank you so much. Yep, absolutely. The information and opinions expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of ASRM and its affiliates.
These are provided as a source of general information and are not a substitute for consultation with a physician.
