THE FERTILITY CRISIS NOBODY'S TALKING ABOUT

Sperm quality has been on a global decline for years. But only recently did we find out that Black men are suffering worst of all.

- MELANIE CURRY

CARL LAMBERT, M.D., has seen it all after telling his male patients they are the reason their partner can't get pregnant: despair, desperation, even flat-out denial. But Dr. Lambert, a primary-care doctor who treats couples having trouble with fertility at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, says he never imagined he'd be the one to have those feelings.

In early 2020, after trying for a baby with his wife for two years, he was told by a fertility doctor that his sperm quality wasn't right for conception. It didn't matter that he was a physician specializing in infertility. At that moment, he was a man-a Black man at that-and the idea that his sperm was the problem was unfathomable, he says.

You've probably read the news about how sperm health has been tanking globally. Back in 1992, a study in the British Medical Journal sounded alarms that we were in a crisis-sperm quality and quantity had been steadily declining for 50 years. Another report 25 years later corroborated the downward trend.

Still, it's been easy for Black men to think this doesn't apply to them. After all, nobody talks about it. Focus groups of Black men in D. C., convened by a researcher named Nathan McCray when he was a graduate student at the George Washington University in 2015, confirmed that infertility was seen as a "threat to masculinity" and a "taboo subject in the African American community." Plus, it's not like there was a lot of research on infertility in Black men.

Actually, McCray noticed that there was basically none. "Most often, these studies that's if they even report on men of color-only have 2 to 10 percent. Men and women of color are pigeonholed into studies on STD or HIV risk. And as a result, you have this kind of [perception] of infertility being a white person's problem."