Max was 39 when he decided to get his sperm tested. The marketing manager from the Midlands, had seen friends struggling to conceive, and realised that it often seemed to be the man’s fertility causing issues. “That came as a shock because you don’t ever really think it’s a male problem, but that’s just arrogance and ego I suppose,” Max, now 43, says. “It’s almost a divine belief that every man on the planet can have children when they want, as much as they want. But it’s not like that at all.
“My wife and I were thinking about having a child in the next few years, so I decided to have a test. My sperm count came back as average at best and I was told that age was only going to make it worse. That was a wake-up call.” Max is one of a growing number of men starting to realise that their fertility might not be the sure-thing they had imagined. While the conversation usually revolves around a woman’s “fertility window”, the number of healthy sperm a man produces does decline over 40 — and there are signs that might be speeding up.
