Here's how sick sperm hurts your wife

 

Has your wife experienced repeated miscarriages, especially within the first three months of pregnancy and you are still trying to achieve a pregnancy that she could carry to term?

As a man, if you answer an emphatic ‘yes’ to this question, it may be time to focus on yourself because, experts say, the repeated miscarriages — medically known as abortion — may be due to the fact that your sperm is defective. If this is the case, you need medical attention; otherwise, your desire to have a baby may be a mirage, especially if you are over 40 years of age.

Generally, physicians say between 20 and 30 per cent of all women spot, bleed or suffer cramps during their first 12 weeks of pregnancy, while about 10 per cent miscarry. Gynaecologists warn that a good number of women miscarry unknowingly, thinking that their period was late or heavy.

Though a woman may suffer miscarriage for many reasons, gynaecologists say the commonest reason for a first-trimester miscarriage is a genetic defect in the embryo. Experts say about three in every five early miscarriages are thought to be connected to foetal abnormality, which may have been as a result of abnormality with the woman’s egg or the man’s sperm.

The Medical Director of Nordica Fertility Centre, Dr. Abayomi Ajayi, says the abnormality may be a combination of the problem with the man and the woman. He describes such miscarriages as the nature’s way of preventing the birth of a baby with a birth defect.

This genetic error is a random event which happens by chance, experts say; and it occurs because a genetically abnormal egg or sperm gets fertilised.

Having a miscarriage is an unpalatable experience; but when it happens repeatedly, it’s bound to have psychological and emotional effects on, not just the woman but her husband also. The situation is even worse if the couple has been trying for a child.

Ajayi says that though every woman has some chromosomally abnormal eggs and every man produces some chromosomally abnormal sperm, when a man has high volume of abnormal sperm, his wife may continue to experience miscarriages even if she has the best eggs in town.

“The quality of the man’s sperm can sometimes be the cause of recurrent miscarriages,” Ajayi warns; “hence the advice for men to do a sperm test to be sure.”

Culled from PUNCH