Are YOU
FERTILE?
"A 50% global decrease in male sperm. The power to change the sex of your unborn child.
Fresh news from the fertility front."
by Marc Star
ome call it a secret mixture. Others call it a hoax. Hopeful mothers around the world are now seeking alternative methods not only to beat infertility, but to help determine the gender of the child as well. These methods, however, are nothing new. They're based on the millennia old art of Chinese herbalism. Their degree of effectiveness can be rather surprising, depending on who you ask.
The most daunting claim came from a Dr Lin in Monterey Park, California. He claims to practice the ancient therapy of giving his female patients a child of the desired gender. And he boasts an 85% success rate. If you take into account that half of those women would have produced that gender child to begin with, his success rate drops to 70%, still a formidable rate when you consider the magnitude of the feat: Dr Lin claims to be able to change a zygote seeded with an XX sperm into a male child and vice-versa. All you need to do is take his secret potion within weeks of conception. The herbs create a certain environment, Lin says, that is conducive to developing a certain gender. I wanted a second opinion.
"Be wary of those claims," Dr Li of Tarzana warned over the phone. I told him, falsely, that my wife and I were planning on having a baby. It was done in the name of journalistic integrity. Did he know of any special herbs my purported wife could take so we could be sure our child would be a boy?
"Come to my office. I'll see what I can do."
Perhaps claims like this originated in China. With the one-child limit in force, giving birth to a girl can be a family tragedy. A farmer needs a boy to help with the heavy labor, or face losing his land altogether. Some baby girls are killed, some abandoned and some left to starve to death in orphanages.
Dr Zhang Shuyun fled China last year after an unsuccessful campaign to expose abuses at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute. Shuyun snuck out medical records showing that healthy infants admitted to the institution often died of severe malnutrition weeks or months later. The records show inappropriate switching of medication, the untreated onset of severe malnutrition and blatant medical neglect of life-threatening infections.
Ai Ming also left China last year. An abandoned child, he spent 20 years at the Shanghai orphanage. In 1992 he secretly photographed the emaciated bodies of dead or dying children allegedly chosen for "summary resolution," or death, by staff members seeking to reduce the orphan population.
"The brutal treatment of orphans in Shanghai, which included deliberate starvation, torture and sexual assault, continued over a period of many years and led to the unnatural deaths of well over 1,000 children between 1986 and 1992 alone," the Human Rights Watch announced. Most of these abandoned children are girls. The rest are either born in violation of the one-child policy or were physically or mentally handicapped.
On the surface, using an herbal infusion to ensure one sex over the other would certainly seem like a good alternative to aborting "wrong-sex" fetuses. But the risks of changing the sex of a fetus must be considered. Could we create feminine boys? Or girls who feel like boys trapped in female bodies?
I had many questions for Dr. Li. He was more concerned about my health.
"You look pale," he began. "Do you feel sick?"
"No."
"And your eating habits? Do you have a normal appetite? You look thin."
"I eat enough."
He took my pulse. "Weak." My blood pressure. "Well your heart's strong."
"Stick out your tongue." Ahhhh. "It's brownish. What did you eat today?"
"Just coffee. Though I do smoke an occasional cigarette, and sometimes marijuana."
He wasn't fazed, but he didn't hesitate either. "All that you must stop. The child's sex depends on you, not your wife. You need to have strong, healthy sperm. When you do, your XY sperm will clearly be the stronger sperm, and you will have a boy."
My thinness is a sign of less-than-perfect health, but, he said, it was better than being overweight. Overweight men, he says, generally have girls because their unhealthy diet generates slow-moving sperm.
There must be something my wife could take, I demanded, to create an appropriate male-breeding environment within her womb.
"Her only influence on the child is how her ph affects the sperm." The XY sperm like high acidity and will perform stronger under those conditions. If it is early in her cycle, she will naturally be more acidic. Just to be sure, a 1% (or less) vinegar douche can be used to increase your chances. Likewise, high alkalinity will tip the scales toward the XX sperm. A baking soda and water solution will raise the alkalinity. But this approach ignores the fact that sperm can remain active inside the woman for up to 48 hours. Two days in a 28-day cycle is a significant amount of time.
The front of Dr Li's office is a counter full of Chinese herbs and medicine. "Ginseng and deer antler will strengthen a man's sperm. You need more Yang. This will help, too." He handed me a package of Nan Bao pills. Among the ingredients listed were the penises and testicles of a dog and a horse.
Sperm doesn't just determine whether you have a boy or a girl. Nowadays, it may determine if you have a child at all. Danish pediatric Endocrinologist Niels E. Skakkebaek has concluded that the average sperm count around the world has fallen nearly 50%. In 1940 the average sperm count was 113 million per milliliter. Fifty years later, it has fallen to 66 million. When that figure drops to 20 million, fertility is seriously impaired. Since 1940 the number of men whose sperm counts drop below the 20 million mark has tripled. In the last 40 years the percentage of infertile couples has risen from 14.4 to 18.5. The effect of this fertility drop can even be felt in the sperm banks where doctors worry that, if the decline continues at the present rate, within a decade there will no longer be any donors to fill the cups. One doctor speculates that within 70 to 80 years, sperm counts will hit rock bottom.
Not only do we have to contend with low sperm counts, roughly 40% of that sperm is abnormal. The number of morphologically normal sperm produced by the average man has dropped below the level produced by a hamster whose testicles are a fraction the size. Some sperm have two heads or no tail. Some are shaped like cigars or over-inflated balloons.