Fertility In The Human Race

Author: Melvin Ng

The ability of both animals and people to produce numerous healthy offspring is called fertility. This term was originally applied only to the females but with better understanding of the reproductive mechanisms, the importance of male fertility is also gaining in importance. A person or animal that cannot produce offspring is considered to be infertile.

With humans, fertility in a person depends on various issues like sexual behavior, nutrition, culture, endocrinology and instinct. Along with this timing, emotions, economics and the
way of life all play an important part in the fertility of a person. Animal fertility also follows such factors and displays great mechanisms. Vegetables and plants in farmlands also experience fertility, which is the capacity to produce large yields of fruits, seeds or vegetables.

The term fertility rate is the measure of number of children per woman. This was first considered a good indicator of population growth. However, it is not so much so in Asia anymore. This is due to selective abortion and various other factors that the number of females in Asia is rapidly decreasing.  Because of this, the fertility rate is no longer considered to be  authoritative in measuring population growth in the Asian countries of China, Myanmar and India.

The hormonal cycles in both men and women help to tell when the woman can conceive and when the man is very fertile. Though the hormonal cycle of the female is constant, about twenty eight days long, the male cycle is variable. The fourteenth day of the female cycle is the most fertile period for females. This is because they ovulate at this time. There is no such period for
men to ejaculate and produce sperm which is produced any time of the month. However, it is their libido that may dip and this is what scientists refer to as their hormonal cycle.

It is during the fourteenth week of fetal growth that a woman's eggs forms in the ovaries. They remain there till puberty where the eggs mature one by one. On ovulation, the egg bursts from
the ovary. This may sometimes because a small and sharp pain called mittelschmerz . The egg breaks down within twenty fours into its protein components if the egg is not fertilized by a
male's sperm . These components are then reabsorbed by the body.  Because the quality of a man's sperm starts to deteriorate after age 35, it is recommended by some fertility clinics that men  freeze their sperm before this age if they plan to have kids later. There are men however who produce healthy sperm long after 40!

Women are most fertile in their twenties, and their fertility starts to diminish after 30. It is often better to get pregnant at a young age as the possibility of miscarriage increases with age. Even the possibility of birth defects in the baby increases with the age of the mother.  Multiplying the possibility rate of a conception with the miscarriage rate and the birth defect rates give the best possibility of a healthy birth.

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For more info on fertility, ovulation, infertility and pregnancy, please visit our website. http://www.fertilityfacts.org