Modern State of Fertility 2019 | Hacker News Reader

Modern State of Fertility 2019

modernfertility.com

18 pointscarlylayy11 comments

My wife and I are so happy that we learned natural family planning through our church. It cleared up a lot of questions we had had about fertility (male and female), and was significantly more in depth than any sex education course in high school. Not sure why more isn't taught.

That being said a few things about the study:

1. The number of women who "Attended and/or completed graduate school" is 40.1%, which means this is not a representative sample of 'modern women', since most modern women have not gone to graduate school

2. Statements like 'X% of women believe that people believe Y' says more about what the individual woman believes than what society believes. In that light, it's interesting to note that, despite most women thinking that infertility is especially stigmatized in women, the majority of women still do not want their children to marry a man who is infertile.

The last word of the first sentence attracted downvoting?

I'll be on the male's side here because I am one: my wife and I haven't been able to conceive, going on 5 years trying now. I wish there was more (maybe any?) support for males going through this.

A lot of efforts focused on women are popping up, which is nice, but it still has a profound mental affect on men.

I'm sorry that you are going through this. As a man myself who has been through a lot of fertility-related experiences (recurrent miscarriages), I will echo the point that there is limited support for men, and even less interest in understanding male factors for fertility-related woes. For example, research is quite clear that there is a male factor of some sort related to pre-eclampsia and gestational hypertension in the woman (my wife has had gestational hypertension before). There is also research showing that non-standard sperm tests (for example DNA fragmentation) can affect miscarriage rates. I am sure there are other more advanced tests for men for those couples who are having trouble conceiving. However, every time I asked for these tests, it was pointed out to me that few labs are able to do the testing, and that it would be difficult to do. In many cases, I had to insist that I be tested at all. That's my experience.

It's not just emotional support; IME, there seems to be a general disinterest in men's bodies as reproductive entities, even though there seems to be a great deal of interest in telling men how 'it takes two to tango' and 'be there for your wife' and '50% of problems are with the man' (it's like, okay if 50% of problems could be with me, then how come you can't test for any of them?)

I do not understand why at the very start it states that "it takes two to tango" about men fertility and the rest is all about women.

Is this an ad of some sort? More context please.

Typically, Show HNs have a technical angle to them. Is this fertility test you’re selling groundbreaking in an interesting way we can learn something from?

Otherwise, it looks like you specifically created this account to post this website for some ‘growth hacking’ experiment which is generally frowned upon.

Do you really need context? It's a bunch of statistics about fertility and people's beliefs about fertility.

I thought it was very interesting.

I completely disagree. Most of those statistics are either common knowledge or not really interesting enough to be front page HN.

At any rate, It looks like the post has been weighted down by one of the mods.

The survey would disagree with your argument that they are common knowledge.

It's from a healthcare startup that provides "proactive fertility" at-home tests and analyzes them combined with blood tests and other medical factors. It costs $159. Use case would be like if you're a 28-year old woman, to know the status of your fertility. You may decide that you need to try to become pregnant earlier than planned if your fertility markers are lower than average, for example.

I was pretty stunned that "in the majority of IVF cases, a woman cannot have a baby using her own eggs". Apparently 89% of women are also not aware of this. Does anyone know more about this? Here [1] it shows that at age 35-37, 30% of nondonor IVF cycles result in live birth. How does this square with the above fact? Is it because they would only try IVF in the first place if they thought the nondonor eggs were viable?

[1] https://www.advancedfertility.com/ivf-age.htm

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