The Infertility Paradox: Why Making Babies Is So Hard

By Meredith F. Small, LiveScience's Human Nature Columnist Meredith F. Small is an anthropologist at Cornell University and is also the author of "Our Babies, Ourselves; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent" and "The Culture of Our Discontent; Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness." Her Human Nature column appears each Friday on LiveScience. The human male releases about 66 million sperm during each ... encounter. If that act involves a woman with an egg waiting in her fallopian tubes, it's really a crapshoot as to whether one of those sperms fertilizes her egg and fathers a child; since it takes only one sperm to make a baby, there are 59,999,999 extras along for the ride. And yet, many men with millions of sperm to spare are considered infertile; a "low" sperm count is anything under 20 million. According to... [read full story]