Getting pregnant with new technology

Oladapo Ashiru

 From sociological studies, the fact that humans make love facing each other indicates a communication of direct sexual interest and development of love, permanent mating and a family system.

On the contrary, throughout the animal kingdom, the female squats in her position of ‘heat’ and the male mounts on top of her, facing her rear end. The animals never get to look at each other and do not need to know each other or get emotionally involved for intercourse to take place. In other words, in animals, sex is not emotional but procreational.

For humans, having sex is about expressing emotions and not just for the purpose of having babies. This makes us less reproductively efficient.

Male reproduction

The reproductive system of the human male is also highly inefficient. Most male animals produce 25 million sperms per day per gram of testicular tissue. Humans produce only four million sperms. Only the gorilla, the cheetah and the goose produce less sperm per gram and testicular tissue than us!

To illustrate the importance of sperm per gram of testicular tissue, the average bull ejaculates about 10 billion sperms, whereas the average fertile man’s ejaculation would contain between one and five billion sperms. This means that the average bull in a single ejaculation produces 30 to 100 times more than that of the average man.

The bull’s sperm will also move three times the speed of the human sperm, in a perfectly straight line, with virtually no abnormal, weak or deformed sperms. A man whose ejaculation has 60 per cent of the sperm moving is lucky. Studies on sperm population find that up to 40 per cent of a man’s sperm are abnormal.

Take the pig as an example to really show superior fertility! The pig ejaculates an entire pint of sperm on having sex with the sow. Its orgasm will take a full half hour. Compare this to a mere 120 seconds for most men. In addition, the pig has little screws like grooves on the end of its penis that fit into a similar groove in the cervix of the female. This guarantees that no sperm will leak during intercourse. The amount of sperm in a single pig’s ejaculation is about 400 times higher than the amount of sperm in a single human’s ejaculation, and none is lost. In most animals, the sperm cells, as they mature from stage to stage, are arranged in perfect order. This is not so in humans whose sperm cells mature in a helter-skelter fashion, according to histologists.

Human sperm count so poor

Several factors have been blamed for the low sperm count in men. One of these is stress. It has been well documented that modern life can have a negative impact on reproduction. Many sperm banks in Europe, America and here in Lagos get medical students or other professional students to donate sperms. It is not unusual for good donors with high sperm count on one occasion to have a poor sperm count on the next occasion, if the donor is having an exam.

There was a case in the University of California where a donor’s sperm count went literally to zero. It was only a close interview that revealed that this student was going through a bout of depression, thinking that his life was falling apart.

There are cases of infertility with low sperm count from the husband. When the couple goes on vacation, the wife gets pregnant because of the change in the environment, which removes the male stress factor.

Hazardous substances

There are several factors in the environment that have terrible effects on the sperm. To make the situation worse, many of these substances have not been thoroughly documented, researched or accounted for. In a village in China in the early 1920s, for instance, they discovered that fertility was on the decline and the women were not getting pregnant. Suddenly, in the 1930s, the sterility was reversed and the people started having children again. The villagers thought that the curse placed on them had been lifted. It was later they realised that the sterility was due to change in cooking oil.

The use of cheap crude cottonseed oil for cooking created the sterility in men. It was found that the crude extract contained a chemical called gossypols that causes male sterility and has now been used as a male contraceptive. A good number of these were discovered by accident, while there are several out there that are yet to be discovered.

There are possibly many herbs or fruits that contain gossypol-like substances that the Nigerian population eats and which we do not know about.

Sexually transmitted diseases

Research shows that about 10 percent of human infertility is caused by tubule obstruction, and this is usually, although not always, caused by infectious diseases transmitted sexually. One third of African men are sterile because of epididymal obstruction caused by STDs.

For example, gonorrhoea causes irreversible tubule blockage. This type of infertility caused by STDs requires the most complex medical treatment, which includes new methods of assisted conception or reproductive technology.