Male ‘biological clock’ can affect chances of birth more than was thought | Hacker News Reader

Male ‘biological clock’ can affect chances of birth more than was thought

theguardian.com

38 pointspseudolus17 comments

So there was no effect for women under 35 or over 40? This screams of cherry-picking data to fit a forgone conclusion. Outlets like The Guardian desperately want fertility windows to not be a female only thing, but biology doesn't give a damn about gender equality.

So if you control for the age of women, the age of men has more impact?

They needed to exclude all women outside of a five year age range (because then the male's age didn't matter), in order to find an impact based on the age of the sperm donor (male). Otherwise, it was the solely women's age that had an impact on fertility.

>desperately want fertility windows to not be a female only thing

But it is a fertility window, and an interesting result most probably didn’t know about, at that. These results can be discussed on their own merits, provided some scientific background.

Politics is such a dead-end dimension through which to have these discussions, but it’s an easy inlet for those who want to voice something, anything, even if it’s a nebulous conspiracy.

“It found that for women under 35 or over 40, the age of their male partner made little difference to their chances of giving birth. But for women between the ages of 35 and 40, there was a “significant drop” in the live birth rate if the male partner was aged 40 and above.”

Sounds like p-hacking to me.

I don't get why people immediately scream "p-hacking" and "cherry-picking data" when the simpler explanation is that for women over the age of 35 their own fertility issues dominate to the point where the effect of male age is lost in the noise. If women have less difficulty conceiving, it stands to reason that other factors are easier to discern. Which in no way would invalidate the existence of those other factors.

On top of that, why would this be surprising to anyone? Sperm quality decreases with age, and there is such a thing as andropause.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11850741/

It’s not just “lost in the noise”, it’s functionally insignificant. These outlets will do whatever it takes to try and draw a forced parity between the sexes.

So if you wanna have a bunch of kids gotta do it in your 20s or marry/find someone much younger than you. Used to be true just for men but turns out it’s true for women too.

It's a lot easier to work around poor male fertility than poor female fertility. IUI is often enough, IVF has a high success rate if the sperm is the only problem (they can do some extremely invasive procedures to force the sperm DNA into an egg)

...or at the end of the day, donor sperm is an easy option.

It takes probably almost 5-6 figures for *IVF* fertility treatment regardless.

*edit

IUI is not terribly expensive, $1k-$4k, it's not until you get to IVF the dollars start racking up (although in some US states, insurance covers the cost of a few rounds of IVF).

https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/insurance-coverage-for-...

It's not 6 unless you do many rounds of IVF or surrogacy. A round of IVF is on the order of $20k (retrieval and 1-2 implantation attempts).

IUI is not expensive — less than $1k. It's a high-touch turkey baster, with some cleaning and counting in-between.

Donor sperm is not expensive. Maybe $1k if you go through a formal process.

What doesn't cost that much in the US of A medical world?

Donor sperm is a good option if you don’t mind raising a child that’s not yours.

You can also bank some reproductive tissue. It's roughly $1300 for collection, shipment, and 5 years of storage.

I'm familiar with and can recommend Reprotech [1], but any reputable firm will do. You can even establish a trust to manage your tissue beyond death.

(all of this is moot if non-reproductive specific cells can be coaxed into healthy reproductive tissue in the future [2])

[1] https://www.reprotech.com/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/14/scientists-c...

Or just wait a few years to be over 40 and then magically the chance of making a baby together becomes better according to the article.

> It found that for women under 35 or over 40, the age of their male partner made little difference to their chances of giving birth. But for women between the ages of 35 and 40, there was a “significant drop” in the live birth rate if the male partner was aged 40 and above.

The article itself is telling us that there is no affect to the chance of birth except when the woman is 35–40, in which case it apparently makes a difference.

Put another way, "men, it makes no difference except briefly when her age is in this window."

...which it probably actually doesn't.

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