RFK Jr. Is Very Interested In, And Likely Wrong About, Your Teenager’s Sperm Count

Stupidity

from the see,-men? dept

Look, folks, I’m sorry, but RFK Jr. is going to force us to talk about sperm. And I’m very much going to try to keep the jokes at an absolute minimum, because, as per usual when Kennedy starts spouting off about something health-related, this isn’t actually funny.

At this point I don’t think it makes sense to write up an intro to the post about how batshit crazy RFK Jr. is, how awful it is that he is currently running HHS, and how dangerous his policies and ramblings are. I’ve said it all before many, many times. He sucks, you get it, let’s move on.

Kennedy is very interested in your teenager’s sperm. He’s been talking about it for nearly a year now, typically as it relates to his claims that today’s teenage boy has a lower sperm count than men in their sixties and seventies. He growled out this claim once again at a recent White House presser.

Let’s focus in real hard on the claim about teenagers’ sperm count. You know, like putting it under a microscope, as you would do to analyze the sperm concentration in a sample! But not a teenage boy’s sperm count, because, like… why are you even collecting that in the sort of significant numbers that would be required for a proper sample size in a study?

Contrary to Kennedy’s claims, sperm counts decline with age, so young men have much higher counts than older men. And data about sperm counts in teen boys largely does not exist.

Well, of course it doesn’t exist. Why would it? Why in the absolute hell would the parent of a 15 year old be getting that child’s sperm concentration medically tested? Generally, this just isn’t a thing.

This is the hallmark of an RFK Jr. claim. You take outlier studies in unsettled science and declare the minority position conclusively right, so long as it aligns with some larger philosophy you have. In this case, two philosophies of Kennedy’s: a war against environmental chemicals like pesticides and a sort of man-dominated fascism in which hyper-masculinity is of high value.

And here is where I’d like to coin a term: masculofascism. Yes, hyper-masculinity has long been a tenant of fascism generally, but this is, I think, differently emphasized in America’s modern day version. Masculofascism isn’t a word currently — Hi, Webster’s Dictionary! Feel free to adopt this one! –, but I asked Google to tell me what it thinks it would mean on a lark

I mean, come on comrades and friends, I might as well have asked Google to describe RFK Jr. to me.

Anyway, back to sperm. Are sperm rates for teenagers falling? How about for young men, or even men generally? Is this even a thing?

Well, like all manner of health-related topics, it’s complicated.

“This is a very contentious issue in our field, and for every paper that you find that suggests a decline and raises an alarm for this issue, there’s another paper that says that the numbers aren’t changing, and that there’s no cause for concern,” said Dr. Scott Lundy, a reproductive urologist at the Cleveland Clinic.

In fact, this is a topic and debate that goes back decades. Studies have been coming out since the early 90s suggesting that sperm counts in men were in decline compared with their male counterparts in decades past. In fact, the 50% reduction line is just as old.

In 1993, scientist Louis Guillette shocked Congress when he testified at a hearing that “every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was.”

Guillette was referring to a generational decline in sperm count. A year before his testimony, a review of papers published from 1938 to 1991 determined that the average sperm count had fallen around 50%.

As Dr. Lundy indicated earlier, there are other studies that show no decline, too. More of those, actually. Following that hearing, in follow up studies, 35 more studies were done on this topic analyzing historical data, and 27 of them either showed no change or an increase in sperm count (21), or had inconclusive data (6). Only eight of them showed any kind of decline in sperm count or semen quality, a minority position. It’s the minority position.

Oh, and that study’s methodology was heavily disputed.

But many researchers have since found flaws in the review — among them, that it included relatively little data from the first few decades of the analysis, the men in the studies were evaluated using different methods and the data analysis did not account for the fact that many men’s sperm counts fall within a lower range.

“The paper was widely, wildly cited,” but “the statistics were not solid,” said Dolores Lamb, who researches male infertility at Children’s Mercy Kansas City.

I’ll just add to all of that the simple fact that the American population in 1990 was 248.7 million people. In 2023 it was 336.8 million. Somehow, amidst all this drop in sperm count and fertility, the population grew 35% in 30 years.

But we’re not done. More recently, in 2021, Shanna Swan wrote the book Count Down. Swan is a reproductive epidemiologist and argued that sperm counts had fallen by 52% (man, that number keeps coming up) across several continents from 1973 to 2011. In that same book, she argued that the median sperm count would reach null in 25 years. That would essentially end the human race as we know it, of course, which sounds quite alarming. And Swan, to be clear, is well-credentialed.

But it’s very difficult to square her claims with the fact that the population in most if not all of the continents she studied over that same time period has increased, not decreased. Here’s the North American population chart since 1950. If you can spot any sort of real cause for concern, feel free to point it out.

But men’s groups lost their minds over her paper. They argued that something was going on that was causing men to lose their masculinity. That’s the theme here. No longer are men real men. We’re something less than that now and you can tell because we don’t produce as many DNA missiles as we used to.

Unfortunately for all this testicle-wringing, Swan’s methodology was also questioned. As was the analysis based on point in time sperm samples generally.

Lamb said the analyses from Swan and her co-authors had a major weakness in their methodology. They assumed that laboratories in different parts of the world were collecting and testing semen in the same way, she said, when in fact the methods likely varied.

Swan stood by her team’s results, saying in an email that they accounted for differences in methodologies across studies, as well as the challenges of getting accurate sperm counts.

Lundy, of the Cleveland Clinic, said measuring sperm counts can be hard to do consistently. The count itself can go up and down depending on the frequency of ejaculation, time of year, or whether someone is injured or has a fever.

His analysis last year found a subtle decline in sperm count among men in the U.S. from 1970 to 2018 but one that most likely wouldn’t affect fertility in real life.

And, of course, there are a ton of potential mitigating factors to account for that could also impact a point in time sperm sample. Smoking effects sperm vitality. While smoking is largely on the decline (probably also seen as a decline in masculinity), there’s no indication a smoking status was accounted for in the samples analyzed for these studies. Alcohol also lowers sperm count and I really hope we aren’t going to argue that America saw a steep decline in alcohol consumption from 1970 to the 2010s (yes, there is currently a trend in America for reduced alcohol consumption, but that’s too new to show up in this data).

And, hey, I’ll give Kennedy some credit: studying pesticide effects on human reproduction, as well as many other healthcare factors, is a worthy area of study. But he undermines his own position when he takes the minority view of a scientific endeavor or area of study and simply declares that view dispositive. And he does this all the time.

And it’s often hypocritical. You know what else vastly decreases sperm count?

Testosterone replacement therapy — a treatment that has exploded in popularity among young men looking to feel more energized or to increase their sex drive — can also shut off sperm production entirely.

“Men on testosterone are almost uniformly azoospermic and totally infertile, and sometimes that is only partially reversible if they’ve been on high-dose testosterone for many years,” Lundy said.

Kennedy himself told Newsmax in 2023 that he takes testosterone replacement as part of an “anti-aging protocol.”

And, of course, there is vastly more to human fertility, or even male fertility, than sperm count. Nuance is what is at play here, not simple answers to complex issues. Or non-issues, as is likely in this context.

But you won’t get that out of Kennedy. Instead, you get that fourth bullet in Google’s interpretation of masculofascism: a devaluation of critical thinking and a preference for quick and simple action in lieu of intellectual discourse.

A more perfect description of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I cannot find.

Filed Under: health and human services, rfk jr., sperm, sperm counts