Men, Too: Infertility Is Not Just a Female Problem

March 6, 2010— -- Jay and Kelli Leiner were high school sweethearts, got married right after college and decided to start a family at age 26.

"I was one of those little girls who had a baby doll clutched in her hands from the beginning. I've always known that I wanted to be a mother," Kelli Leiner said.

But both are now 31 and they've found the journey to parenthood to be long and painful.

"By the time we were 28 and we had no baby yet -- we never got pregnant and the friends that we had were already onto their second child -- we were wondering: What's wrong with us?" Jay Leiner said.

What they discovered surprised them: She didn't have a fertility problem. He did.

Infertility, which affects an estimated 15 percent of all couples in the United States, generally is seen as a woman's problem. However, men now are known to be partly responsible for almost 60 percent of all couples' infertility cases in this country, according to research by Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

At first, Kelli Leiner automatically assumed it was she who had problems conceiving. She immediately went to her gynecologist and asked for testing. But all her tests came back normal.

"I didn't have any issues with infertility. So we tested Jay. The doctors did a semen analysis," Kelli Leiner said. "Tests showed his sperm count was about five million."

"I'm like: That's a lot, five million. I wish I had $5 million," Jay Leiner said. "But when the doctor told us it needs to be more in the 100 million range, I was shocked.

"And on top of the low count," he added, "motility was also low, which means the sperm are not going anywhere, they were lazy sperm."