Is infertility on the rise, or does it just feel like it?

[ShadowPuppets]

Posting in chat, not AIBU and especially not the Infertility board because I’m not trying to be a twat, I’m genuinely wondering.

I was talking to my mum today and mentioned a good friend of mine who has sadly had an MC. My mum (who is lovely, but one of those women who falls pregnant in the perfectly socially acceptable way - with minimal fuss, when you want a baby, never before and never after) said ‘I do wonder why there’s so much of this nowadays - never used to happen when I was trying for babies’.

Mum conceived her kids on cycle 1 (me) and cycle 2 (my sister) but swears she never heard of people trying for 6m+ back in the day. Whereas all the people I know have tried for months before getting a BFP…

For context, she’s talking about late 80s - early 90s and I don’t think she means it maliciously but her take is - when she was having babies, people generally fell pregnant within a couple of cycles. There were miscarriages but generally people fell pregnant again quite quickly, and those who didn’t were in a small percentage - maybe 10% of their friends who never got pregnant and never had kids.

I feel a bit defensive of this because I’m a 33 year old woman with 2 kids but DH and I probably have about 8 couples as friends out of maybe 20 who are struggling to conceive or going through IVF or struggling with recurrent miscarriage.

I guess what I’m asking is, is infertility and miscarriage more of an issue nowadays, or is it just that people are talking about it more? I’d like to go back to my mum with the latter but I don’t know if that’s true.

Both our (renowned) urologist and our head embryologist have said they think it is exposure to plastic that is impacting both sperm and embryo quality and there is a definite decline during their working lives. One is part of a Harvard study on it.

They both said can’t get traction on it because noone wants to know but the science is clear. The decline is gradual and will start getting more and more evident in subsequent generations as the effects ‘pile up’. Neither of them were prompted to say this by me btw, just came up in conversation.

I'm almost certain it's age related. Fewer people ttc in their 20s now. By 30 fertility starts its decline.

Infertility is also investigated/treated more. Back in the day I guess you would've just accepted your fate.

*and by exposure to plastic, this includes common endocrine disruptors like BPAs, PFAS etc. which we all will have in our blood stream as well as the impact of microplastics in our bodies.

Time-bomb, one of them called it. Exposure starts in the womb when your daughters eggs are exposed to the plastic in your body - affecting her children and grandchildren in turn during their fetal development and ongoing lives

Matters not, it’s too late for me and I’ll die childless so I’ve got no skin in the game. It may not be the worst thing if humanity slowly dies out although I well know the personal suffering of infertility is immense and, knowing our species, we are likely to end up in some kind of batshit Handmaiden scenarios….

we’re talking under the age of 35 so wasn’t thinking of that as a factor - it is though. Fertility peaks in the early 20s - it's already lower by age 25 (although still pretty good).

People are definitely having babies later and more open about it plus we are also aware of a lot from the media and social media.

It didn't get talked about as much - my Mum wouldn't have even talked to friends about periods and none of them knew my parents struggled to conceive. A lot was unknown - I have PCOS, and it's highly likely my Mum had too but it wasn't known about then. She also had to wait a couple of missed cycle and go to the GP for a pregnancy test in the late 1970s so the home pregnancy tests weren't available then.

Looking back at my family history there's several generations where only one or two in each generation have a baby. So a handful of siblings but only 2 or 3 children in the next generation down. Only children very common. It doesn't seem to have been talked about though.

• women used to marry at 20 and have kids straight away, now anything under 30s is seen as young.
• people didn’t used to talk about infertility and would sometimes even keep adoptions secret.
• Women are now expected to work demanding stressful jobs while also ttc and are exposed to hormones in milk and in tap water, increased environmental toxins etc etc none of that is good for baby making.

I think that, because of the Internet, we hear about it, and talk about it more. Miscarriage has always happened but if you didn't want to talk about it with family or friends, then you just didn't talk about it.

I think it may well be because we conceived at a younger age. I had four babies in four and a half years in the late eighties/ early nineties. Married at almost 24, first baby at age 24 and 4th at age 29. I was a pretty average age in the maternity ward. To my knowledge I never had a miscarriage as I was sterilised at age 29 when my youngest was three months old. The pregnancy tests that we bought had to be done when your period was two weeks late, so perhaps people had early miscarriages and never even knew they had been pregnant.

I think there are a variety of reasons we hear about it more:

Internet, willingness to share, not such a taboo subject

People are waiting until they are older

Early detection - in "olden" days people just wouldn't have known they were pregnant at 2 weeks and miscarried at 6 weeks - with todays technology you can get a BFP within days and you can see inside scans.

Male infertility is on the rise. I believe the sperm count is dropping everywhere.

I often wonder if it’s nature trying to reduce our numbers. I have no religious faith, but I do suspect there is some kind of intelligence at work in nature - something we cannot understand. When you think how the world’s population has exploded over the last 120 years, it’s astonishing. In 1900, there were a billion of us. By 1960 that had trebled to three billion. It’s now eight billion!! And we’re clearly f*ing up the planet - eating all the fish, dumping plastics into the ocean, pumping carbon into the atmosphere, cutting down trees to build more and more houses, and so on. I think Lovelock was right about nature being a self-regulating organism. To the planet, we’re just a species that needs culling.

Definitely very common. Bizarrely I’m the only one amongst my close friends who fell pregnant easily cycle 1 for both. All my other friends struggled. Two had IVF, the others many cycles in. 3 have never had children due to infertility.

i do have 3 friends with sets of twins though due to ivf!

I think it's the crap put in our tap water, sprayed in our skies, all the chemicals in our body products/shampoos/toothpaste, the way our food is depleted of nutrients now by the time we eat them, all the plastic.

Only my thoughts, they wouldn't have had all that back in the day.

Always wondered this also

Never forget the power of selective memory….

My mum likes to claim ‘nobody’ got hyperemesis and nobody took anti-emetics they just ‘got on with it’ in years gone by.

I point out that’s literally what thalidomide was used for. Thousands of babies affected.

Similar conversation re infertility. Mum insists ‘nobody’ had this problem - this opinion usually served with a hefty wedge of judgment re ‘career women’ as she calls us - I remark she must have been astonished when the first IVF baby was born……the same year as me. When infertility wasn’t a problem. How bizarre she must have found it that decades of research went into a non-existent problem! Etc.

The op is talking about the 80s and 90s not the dark ages!

I can confirm that pregnancy tests were readily available - yes!! in supermarkets!! - in the 1980s and 1990s and would work from the day your period was due. You did not have to sautee a frog under a birch tree beneath the full moon after missing three periods.

My Mum tells me you used to only go to a Doctor after missing two periods. In the 1950s

FWIW I agree with a pp that I suspect couples these days have been together so long by the time they can actually afford to have a baby that their sex life is no longer frequent enough to guarantee instant conception.

Cant find the comment to quote but I'm not sure men were healthier 'back then'. Yes there was less obesity but a lot of people smoked which is known to impact fertility in males.

Agree that the older age of mothers is probably a factor. Even in the early 80s having your first baby after 30 was considered late. If you had medical certain medical problems the doctor would have advise

...advised against getting pregnant but now people still try in their 40s and with all kinds of complicated medical issues making miscarriage more common.

Sorry phone playing up

I fell pregnant on the first try everytime but still had an ectopic in between. It’s more spoken about now.

"then there is the thing"

What is the thing?

Thanks

Age is the biggest factor, even having kids in your 30's vs 20's. My mum's pregnancy notes for me said "geriatric mother". She was 33.
I had my son at 22, completely unplanned. If I hadn't have had him, I wouldn't have any children at all as I now can't have them. Suspected endo, an awful egg supply ten years older than I am plus DH has fertility issues from a severe allergic reaction he had. I was 30 when we started trying, far from old. Yet at 22 I fell pregnant while on the contraceptive pill.

My late mil was born in 1925, had a miscarriage apparently aged about 24 or so and then trouble conceiving again in the 50s and ended up adopting my dh and my late sil early 60s.
She would have been called ' Barron ' I suppose ( back then )
Most of this was hushed up , but lots of problems there , just not discussed or sorted out.

It's the age you start trying to conceive I think.
I had my first at 23 and second at 26, if I had tried to conceive them a decade later I wouldn't have been able to have children.
A lot of medical conditions can be overcome with youth and a good egg supply. By the time we are in our mid thirties we don't have those things going for us!

I think it may seem that way due to the later age of starting a family which is around 30 for women now. It's be some so difficult to settle down and start a family without a lot of money behind you. Plus we are more open about discussing fertility issues and treatments. However anecdotally I know a lot of women who've got pregnant easily in their late 30s/early 40s - many of them on their first try at around 39 or 40.

If you have been on the ttc boards you will notice that some people are desperate for a baby and take tests very early. There are also lots using ovulation kits and taking their temperature, making things all a bit clinical. Often these women have no reason to assume that they will have fertility issues and the average couple takes about a year to conceive. It's quite full on. I should say it's totally understandable if you have been trying for over a year and no luck. As a result of testing people will know if they have had a chemical pregnancy whereas years ago they would have just put it down to a late period. Also the taboo around miscarriages is decreasing (rightly so) and more women are willing to talk about it and share experiences. Many women also don't understand their cycles and when ovulation takes place and the need to have sex in and around that time.

I've had a similar chat with my mum and she thinks it's down to increased maternal age and the amount of processed food we eat as a society. That's her opinion, I've not really given it much thought and that's because I've always been fortunate and conceived on the first cycle. I realise I am lucky.