The journey of an infertile couple. It's important to demystify the fact that infertility is not rare and that anyone can experience it.
It is important to demystify the fact that infertility is not rare and that people close to us may go through similar situations. It is also important to know that medicine, in most cases, gives us tools to overcome a variety of difficulties and make our dream of having a child come true.
Let’s first understand what infertility is: it is considered by the World Health Organization as a disease of the reproductive system defined by the absence of pregnancy after 12 months of regular and unprotected sexual intercourse, and it can affect both women and men. However, this criterion is not strict and in most cases, it should be investigated after 6 months.
It is estimated that 48 million couples worldwide suffer from infertility problems. In Portugal, there are around 300,000 infertile couples. Given these high and increasing numbers every year, infertility is not just a problem for couples or women trying to have a child. Infertility goes beyond that, becoming a social problem that compromises the renewal of generations. Couples and women who experience some difficulty in getting pregnant are not, and cannot be, alone, and medical and psychological support is extremely important.
The causes of infertility can be female, male, a combination of factors or unexplained. In the male partner, the most common causes are changes in sperm concentration, mobility and/or morphology. These changes are detected through a sperm count, which is the best method for diagnosing male factor infertility and should be considered in the initial study of the couple. Factors related to lifestyle and professional activity (contact with chemicals or heat sources, for example) also influence male fertility.
In women, the most common causes of infertility include tubo-peritoneal factors (permeability or altered function of the fallopian tubes), ovulation dysfunctions and endometriosis. Age also plays an important role, as a woman is born with all the follicular reserve she will ever have in her life and every month, throughout her reproductive life, several follicles are recruited. Once the reserve is exhausted, menopause occurs. In addition, as age advances, the quality of the oocytes contained in these follicles also decreases. At this point, it is important to explain another important term when talking about fertility – fecundability, which is the probability of conception in a menstrual cycle.
In women up to the age of 35, this figure is around 20 to 25%. From then on, it declines sharply and reaches values of around 4 to 5% at the age of 40. Therefore, the success rate is not very high and worsens if there is any associated pathology, which is why it is extremely important to seek medical and specialist help to detect any fertility problems in good time.
Dealing with infertility is a process that demands a great deal of emotional effort, so it is important not to assign blame, but rather to diagnose the causes and treat or overcome them, whether through medication, surgery or medically assisted reproduction (MAP) treatments. The social stigma that is created around a possible situation of infertility not only does not contribute to its resolution, but actually makes the situation worse. The blaming of women, which we still see today, no longer has any reason to exist. On the other hand, when there is a male factor as the cause, the situation of infertility often becomes taboo. It is a priority to educate and inform so that couples and women can make informed decisions about when they should get pregnant, whether it would be wise to postpone the project of motherhood until later and so that they understand that infertility is a medical condition like any other, about which one should talk openly and seek help. In addition to the emotional stress, cases in which the solution involves MAP treatments have an additional financial burden. Although there is an effort to ensure that couples and women who wish to become pregnant see their situation resolved by the public health system, in practice this does not happen and resorting to private healthcare is associated with an economic cost, which is often unbearable for some families.
It is in this sense that the Bolsa Baby Zippy was created, designed for couples who are experiencing difficulties in getting pregnant, offering access to specialized professional support and fertility treatments with special conditions in two partner clinics of the brand, including CETI, in Porto. This support ensures specialized medical monitoring in obstetrics and fertility, but also in the area of mental health and emotional support for families.
At CETI, couples and women who want to get pregnant find a team of specialists with the common goal of combining the most specialized medical care with the concern of not letting anyone feel alone on this journey. We found in Zippy a partner with the same concerns and, together, through the Baby Zippy program, we reach more couples and more women, offering more advantageous conditions that facilitate access to the health care we provide.
An article by Ana Gomes, Embryologist at CETI – Center for the Study and Treatment of Infertility, published on the website sapo.pt