Sperm on the rocks, please!
Fertility — and fretting about it — has traditionally been considered a women’s issue. Egg freezing, for example, dominates conversations and Instagram feeds among ladies of a certain age who are worried about their ticking biological clocks.
But experts say that’s finally changing.
Men, too, see “a gradual, slow, steady decline” in sperm quality, Dr. Marc Goldstein, a professor and surgeon-in-chief of male reproductive surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine, tells The Post. And these days, almost half of the couples who face infertility are dealing with issues from the male partner.
Add that to mounting research suggesting we’re in the midst of a “Handmaid’s Tale”-esque sperm apocalypse — with sperm counts plummeting by more than 50% in Western countries over the past 40 years — and it’s no wonder that men are now joining the procreation panic party, with sperm freezing newly trendy.
Goldstein says that he’s seen an uptick of patients interested in having their sperm tested and frozen. There’s even a wave of startups offering at-home sperm testing, collection and freezing: Companies such as Legacy and Dadi charge a few hundred bucks for the deposit and safekeeping of your sample.
Christian, 28, says it was a “weird life moment,” looking at his swimmers under the microscope before he had them frozen at a fertility clinic in February.
“I don’t know if I want to have kids,” says the logistics professional, who declined to share his last name for privacy reasons.
‘If I’m with somebody and we’re both into it, we can just take our pants off at any time.’
He does know that he wants to have fun on dates without stressing out — which is why the Atlanta resident chose to have a vasectomy, freezing his sperm first as an insurance policy.
“It simplifies things,” says Christian, who paid “a few hundred dollars” to have his stuff collected, analyzed and iced. “If I’m with somebody and we’re both into it, we can just take our pants off at any time.” And if he does decide to become a father, he’s glad he’ll have the best quality genetic material available to him.
That’s part of what motivated Felipe Bolivar, a 28-year-old fellow studying addiction medicine at a Manhattan hospital, to freeze his sperm this summer.
Although med school is too crazy for Bolivar to consider having kids right now, he and his girlfriend of four years want to have kids down the line.
“My priority is family and having children,” says the Upper West Sider.
The couple weighed egg freezing — which entails painful shots and an invasive harvesting procedure, and costs upward of $10,000 for the procedure and $1,000 per year to store — with sperm freezing. Sperm, cheaper and considerably less unpleasant procedurally, won.
So Bolivar ordered Legacy, an at-home sperm-freezing-and-testing kit. It cost him $350 for the initial deposit, plus $200 a year to keep his sample on ice. According to the company’s website, his “deposit” will be “split into four — two tanks in two geographies — and [stored] in disaster-proof facilities with 24/7 security.”
Bolivar feels good that he’s done the “best” for his future children by freezing his genetic material before it’s gone south.
For Saad Alam, a 37-year-old health entrepreneur who lives in the Financial District, seeing people his age struggle to conceive — plus some prodding from his girlfriend — was enough to motivate him to get his sperm tested and chilled.
“A lot of our friends who are probably in their mid- to-late 30s are all trying to conceive now. I’d say 30% of them are having real difficulty,” he says.
Alam had sperm on the brain for other reasons, too: At 35, after months of feeling sluggish and off, he was diagnosed with low testosterone.
Concerned that it might affect his fertility, he tested his sperm health with at-home kit Dadi to get a snapshot of where he stood. His sperm tested average in some categories and below average in others.
The news scared him back to the doctor’s office — and he’s glad it did. “I worked with my doctors, got my [hormone] levels back to normal. I feel like I’m 23 years old again. It’s wonderful.”
Soon he’ll get his sperm retested and refrozen by Dadi, which will cryopreserve it in a liquid nitrogen tank at minus 321 degrees and store it in a “state-of-the-art laboratory” in Boston under “constant surveillance,” according to the company’s website.
And Alam will have “what I like to think of in my mind as healthier, more diesel sperm” to turn to when the time comes.
“It’s like when you sign up for a 401(k) — are you really empowered? No,” he says. “But you know you’re doing the right thing for a later date in time. You’ve done the mature, adult thing.”