CARL LAMBERT, M.D., has seen it all after telling his male patients they are the reason their partner can’t get pregnant: despair, desperation, even flat-out denial. But Dr. Lambert, a primary-care doctor who treats couples having trouble with fertility at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, says he never imagined he’d be the one to have those feelings.
In early 2020, after trying for a baby with his wife for two years, he was told by a fertility doctor that his sperm quality wasn’t right for conception. It didn’t matter that he was a physician specializing in infertility. At that moment, he was a man—a Black man at that—and the idea that his sperm was the problem was unfathomable, he says.
You’ve probably sounded alarms that we were in a crisis—sperm quality and quantity had been steadily declining for 50 years. Another report 25 years later corroborated the downward trend.
