What does the lack of resources for these people say about how our society views parenthood and who has a right to it?

Yeah, well, I think it's really important to recognize that a lot of the discussions around infertility tend to assume a heterosexual partnership.

And so the moment that you sort of expand your thinking into couples and individuals beyond that heterosexual sort of assumed relationship, It raises all kinds of questions about who has access to reproductive technologies.

What do insurance companies mandate in terms of coverage? How are people going to be treated when they walk into a fertility clinician's office in order to seek treatment? And so for LGBT communities who are often very interested in having children and partnering and creating families of all kinds, it's really important to not just limit our discussions of infertility to heterosexual couples.

And so when you think about, again, this broader societal cultural question about how we approach medicine more broadly, what questions do you think we need to grapple with?

Yeah, well, I think the first thing to note is that the medical specialization and medical knowledge around reproduction being focused on women goes back to the 1800s when the medical profession started to take the shape that it takes today.

Very early on, OBGYN sort of emerged as a subspecialty of medical knowledge, and they kind of hived off fertility and reproduction and made it about women's bodies.

And I've written about the various attempts over the last 130 years to create a specialty for male reproductive health program.

What would they wake up to? What would the world be like if they had the same kind of messaging that women get about making babies?

Right.

Well, as probably, uh, almost any of your listeners [laughs] listening today will attest, uh, there are just sort of endless public health messages to women about their reproductive health, particularly if they're thinking about having children.

And so, you know, there are billboards, there are advertisements in magazines, their doctors will bring up with women sort of the importance of what they eat and drink and avoiding smoking and avoiding toxins.

And this does not happen at all for men, even though we are starting to gather quite a good bit of data that the health of men's bodies prior to conception can affect the health of their sperm and potentially the health of their children.

But men are not seeing billboards.

They are not being-

Some gender assumptions sneak through the back door of what sex is.