Why only female fertility?

THE EDITOR: The role of gender in fertility laws and medical research is well worth exploring. A moment’s thought will reveal that men have the potential for far higher fertility than women. Even with multiple births a woman needs six to nine months to produce a child. A man could impregnate another woman for every day of that period. Even at one per week, he would approach 40 while a pregnant woman may deliver at most seven. The reproductive life of women typically runs for 30 years from about age 15 to 45. A man could be fertile for 50 years or more. The world record for the number of children born to one woman is 69, from 27 pregnancies. Mrs Vassilyev was a Russian peasant and lived in the 18th century. She never had a single birth. She had four sets of quadruplets, seven sets of triplets, and sixteen pairs of twins — Guinness Book of Records, p 3, 1997.

However astonishing that figure is, it pales in comparison with the world record for the number of children attributed to one man. The last Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, Mulai Ismail (1646-1727), had more than 1,000 children. He had scores of concubines and apparently set out to keep them quite busy. (www.sexualrecords.com/wsrprey.html) Why then are our efforts at fertility regulation so predominantly focused on controlling female fertility? Why is it that we have 40 to 50 tubal ligations for every one vasectomy? A single vasectomy, more reliable, cheaper, less prone to complications and requiring less health resources, has a far greater value for fertility regulation. If the men who make the laws and develop the drugs that regulate human fertility were truly interested in gender equity, they would be far more attentive to regulating male fertility.

MAUREEN V P EVANS
Port-of-Spain