Sure, Let's Talk About Sperm

One of the greatest academic journal articles ever written is about sperm. Or, rather, it’s about how science misconstrues the role of sperm in human reproduction and, as a result, naturalizes women’s subordination.

More about that article in a moment.

I’ve been thinking about it as I try to wrap my head around another round of scientifically inaccurate and misogynistic warnings about an alleged “fertility crisis” in the United States. (Declining fertility rates do not necessarily a crisis make.) When the representatives of the current administration discuss human reproduction, it gets weird quickly. Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, bemoaned the American man’s declining sperm count, while Mehmet Oz, the director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, warned that one third of American women are “under-babied.”

They made these comments on May 11 at an Oval Office event ostensibly focused on promoting investments in maternal healthcare, including the launch of “moms.gov,” a website for women experiencing “difficult or unexpected pregnancies.” Moms.gov is a one-stop shop for ethically dubious healthcare. Featuring a stock footage image of a pregnant white woman, the site provides links to crisis pregnancy centers—the unlicensed pseudo-clinics that impersonate actual women’s health clinics, provide free pregnancy tests, pressure pregnant women into having ultrasounds, and then discourage them from having abortions. At moms. gov you’ll also find the new “TrumpRx” prescription discount service, which isn’t a service at all but rather a series of links to existing prescription discounts for people without health insurance. Not least, moms.gov touts the Trump Accounts, a cash incentive premised on the absurd contention that a couple thousand dollars makes raising a child in the United States today meaningfully more affordable.

RFK Jr. and Oz walked into an Oval Office press conference about maternal healthcare with one overriding concern: that the declining fertility rates in the United States present an “existential crisis.” What does it mean to worry about a falling fertility rate? Or to push programs intended to raise it? Dr. Oz’s bizarre neologism is a pretty big tell. This administration has made its pronatalist goal of increasing the (white) American birth rate clear from the start, building from policy recommendations in the Heritage Foundation’s reactionary policy guide, Project 2025. At its core, this is an effort to tell (white) women to have more babies for the good of the nation. It’s not difficult to connect the dots and see how comments about a fertility crisis fit within a white supremacist agenda. This administration has granted asylum to white South Africans, engaged in violent deportation actions against immigrants of color, and fired or demoted high-achieving people of color and women on the presumption that so-called “DEI hires” were never qualified for their positions, all while treating every white man in authority as presumptively competent. The president’s language about “low-IQ” individuals comes straight from the eugenics playbook, enlivening century-old ideas about the superior hereditary “fitness” of the “white race.” When administration officials talk about a “fertility crisis,” they are referring to the idea that the relative number of white people in the United States is declining, and they think that’s terrible.

RFK Jr.’s assertion about teenage boys’ sperm count not only amplifies this racist logic, it’s also bogus. At the Oval Office event, he claimed, as he has before, that in the 1970s adult men “had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today.” He seems to have invented that comparison out of thin air. The major study that documents the declining sperm count—a 2022 review of global trends, published in Human Reproductive Update—does not mention teens. Reporting at Wired noted that it’s not clear that there is much of a decline at all, nor is it clear what has caused global male fertility rates to decline:

…the science is extremely dubious, says Ashley Wiltshire, a fertility specialist at Columbia University Fertility Center, noting that the research this claim is ostensibly based on has been “debunked” by more contemporary studies. A meta-analysis published last year in the Journal of Fertility and Sterility found that sperm count among men had not declined between 1970 and 2023, but stayed relatively stable over time. Though Wiltshire notes that male infertility has indeed been on the rise globally (not just in the US), the specific causes of this decline remain unclear, nor do they seem directly related to the sperm count study cited by Kennedy.

Perhaps equally as concerning, RFK Jr.’s leadership of the anti-vax, wellness-influencer-directed “MAHA” movement elevates unproven explanations of sperm count decline as the result of pesticides and other chemicals. The same administration that seeks to ban gender-affirming care for nonbinary and transgender people is considering opening a national network of men’s health clinics (“Men’s Health Centers of Excellence”) to provide testosterone replacement therapy for American men.

Let’s consider the possibility, though, that the United States is in the midst of a dramatic fertility decline. Is it ethical to try to do something about that? If you support reproductive justice, the answer is no. Any attempt to try to push the fertility rate upward is an attempt to pressure or even force women to carry to term more pregnancies than they otherwise prefer to do.

As Bianca Allison, a professor of pediatric and adolescent medicine told NPR last month, “What is actually affecting the birth rates are likely lower rates of teen pregnancy overall, which is in the context of higher use of contraception and lower sexual activity for youth, and then also continued access to abortion care.” Allison continued, “From my perspective, as somebody who specifically studies the provision of high-quality reproductive health care and access for young people, this should be celebrated as long as this is aligned with what people are actually wanting for themselves.”

Historian Nils Gilman has an excellent essay over on his Substack, Small Precautions, about the fallacies of long-range demographic projection. I want to highlight one point he makes exceptionally well (emphasis added by me):

And underneath every demographic anxiety about birth rates, there is a gender politics that almost never gets stated directly but that structures everything. Falling fertility rates are, definitionally, the result of women choosing — both individually and in aggregate — to have fewer children. When states or pundits or demographers express alarm about this, they are expressing the view that women are making “wrong” choices. The entire apparatus of pro-natalist policy — tax incentives, parental leave top-ups, rhetorical appeals to motherhood — is premised on the idea that women’s fertility decisions should be steered toward outcomes that (usually male) political actors have decided are in the national interest.

RFK Jr., Oz, and their lackeys at HHS have the science wrong, misunderstand demographic data, and openly tout eugenic proposals. Their fixation on sperm counts brings me back to that article I mentioned up front.

Dr. Emily Martin, an emerita professor of anthropology at New York University, published “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” in 1991 in Signs, an academic journal of feminist scholarship. Most academic articles find an extremely limited audience. “The Egg and the Sperm” has been translated into German, Chinese, Greek, Spanish, and French and reprinted in more than twenty anthologies, from collections of canonical feminist works to books with titles like Effective Writing. And effective it is. The opening paragraph sets forth the article’s main idea and argument about a “scientific fairy tale”:

In the course of my research I realized that the picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female. The stereotypes imply not only that female biological processes are less worthy than their male counterparts but also that women are less worthy than men. Part of my goal in writing this article is to shine a bright light on the gender stereotypes hidden within the scientific language of biology. Exposed in such a light, I hope they will lose much of their power to harm us.

Martin outlines the stereotypes that shape depictions of human reproduction in representative scientific texts. One such text “employs a sort of breathless prose when it describes the maturation of sperm,” gushing that “the most amazing characteristic of spermatogenesis is its sheer magnitude,” a quality that renders the hundreds of millions sperm produced daily a miracle of nature.

Martin finds none of that enthusiasm in scientific texts’ descriptions of ovulation: “Far from being produced, as sperm are, [ova] merely sit on the shelf, slowly degenerating and aging like overstocked inventory.” Characterizations of the female reproductive system as wasteful but of the man’s as productive create an absurd comparison: “Assuming two or three offspring, for every baby a woman produces, she wastes only around two hundred eggs. For every baby a man produces, he wastes more than one trillion (10¹²) sperm.” Martin lays out more evidence of the gender stereotypes that shape descriptions of human reproduction when she compares scientific depictions of egg and sperm:

The egg is seen as large and passive. It does not move or journey, but passively “is transported,” “is swept,” or even “drifts” along the fallopian tube. In utter contrast, sperm are small, “streamlined,” and invariably active. They “deliver” their genes to the egg, “activate the developmental program of the egg,” and have a “velocity” that is often remarked upon… Together with the forces of ejaculation, they can “propel the semen into the deepest recesses of the vagina.” For this they need “energy,” “fuel,” so that with a “whiplashlike motion and strong lurches” they can “burrow through the egg coat” and “penetrate it.”

She quotes from one text that compares “the egg’s role to that of Sleeping Beauty: ‘a dormant bride awaiting her mate’s magic kiss, which instills the spirit that brings her to life.’” Other texts portray sperm as engaged in a “mission,” “in quest of the ovum,” or on a “perilous journey.” The egg, these texts explain, will die “unless rescued by a sperm.”

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Representations of female reproductive passivity mischaracterize the ovum’s active role in sperm selection. Facts undermine these characterizations, showing them to be gendered fantasies, not factual descriptions. Eggs move, select, connect, and mobilize processes of fertilization. When scientific texts impose cultural stereotypes onto biological processes, they reproduce stories about male superiority and female subordination in ways that are inaccurate, damaging, and misleading.

All of which is to say, the very notion that a woman could be “under babied” rests on a definition of woman as a carrier of babies, a womb in waiting, who either adequately produces or wantonly wastes her eggs during her fertile years. It’s an idea that echoes in RFK Jr.’s fixation on teenagers’ sperm counts as the active agents of human reproduction, their relative quantity a fundamental index of masculinity.

Scholars like Emily Martin are precisely the sort that Republican legislatures and boards of trustees in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere are firing en masse. (Follow The Higher Ed Advocate for updates about the assault on the humanities currently underway, including prohibitions on teaching about gender / LGBTQ+ studies.) If you know that gender functions as a form of power, and you recognize connections between racism and sexism, then the preposterousness of moms.gov and of the “fertility crisis” conversation are so obvious, they are almost difficult to explain. I struggled to write this essay because I wanted to find the verbal equivalent of running around with my hair on fire, waving my hands frantically and pointing at all the things. The people pushing these awful policy agendas don’t want us to understand what they’re up to. Do yourself a favor, then, and read one of the greatest academic journal articles ever written.