Gear Infertility Support for Couples

Infertility support networks should be developed for couples, not just women, according to a researcher at Cardiff University, in Wales.

Laura Peronace and her team from the school of psychology at Cardiff University set out to see whether men with male factor infertility suffer more than men in couples where the infertility comes from the woman.

There is a common belief that being unable to father a child is shameful and emasculating and it is thought that if the man is the source of the couple’s failure to conceive he is likely to suffer more emotionally than if the problem lies with the woman, Peronace said in a statement.

The study of 256 men from the Copenhagen Multi-Centre Psychosocial Aspects of Infertility research program who had known that they were infertile for over four years were divided into four categories: unexplained infertility; female infertility; male infertility; or mixed.

We found that social stress, marital stress, coping effort and physical stress increased over time, whereas mental health decreased, but all men in all four groups suffered equally, according to Peronace.

The findings were presented at the 23rd annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, in Lyon, France.