Has infertility increased in recent years in Spain?
Yes, we can answer quite confidently that in absolute terms there has been an increase in infertility in Spain for various reasons, but from my point of view the most important one is determined by our demographic trends, which are well known.
Fundamentally, the progressive aging of the population and the increase in the life expectancy of all people, but fundamentally of women. And this is the key factor for me, that women, as their life expectancy increases, are increasingly delaying the moment when they decide to become mothers for the first time.
What solutions exist for infertility?
The most desirable solution would be precisely the one based on changing the current demographic trend, and that is for women to become aware that they should really try to become mothers as soon as possible. This change of trend may take some time and therefore we have 2 concrete solutions that we can apply today from the point of view of reproductive technology, which are egg donation and fertility preservation.
What is egg donation?
It is an in-vitro fertilization procedure that consists of ovarian stimulation of a woman who is going to donate her eggs, which will be received by a patient, the recipient woman, who after insemination will allow the embryos to be transferred to her uterus.
It is required that the donor be a young woman, under 35 years of age, and that she be healthy, free of transmissible, hereditary or infectious diseases. This process produces, it is true, some slight discomfort in the donor woman, as a result of the successive visits she has to make to the clinic for check-ups and also as a result of the ovarian stimulation itself; in fact, the possibility of compensating the donor woman for any discomfort she may experience is implicit in the reproduction law.
The fundamental advantage of this technique is that a woman who is close to or has already gone through menopause, even close to the age of 50, can become a mother; it is the only technique that allows these women to become mothers.
What does fertility preservation consist of?
Fertility preservation has 2 aspects. One is fundamental, and that is why it came about, which is the use of egg freezing in an oncological patient. A woman who has a tumor in her fertile age and who is also going to be subjected to a gonadotoxic pharmacological treatment that can damage the production of eggs in the ovary. This patient, after overcoming the disease, can use these eggs and have the same probability of pregnancy as she would have had at the age at which they were frozen. And the second very important aspect, which is becoming more and more accepted in recent times, is what we call the social aspect, which consists of delaying motherhood. The demographic trends in our society mean that women are increasingly delaying the age at which they want to become mothers, and therefore the chances of pregnancy are much lower.
Therefore, with this technique, a woman around the age of 30-35 can freeze her eggs and when she wants to become a mother, for example around the age of 40, she will have the same chances of pregnancy as if she had undergone a reproductive technique at the time she froze her eggs.
For more information on fertility preservation techniques, consult an Assisted Reproductive Technologies specialist.