Why Me? Male Infertility and Responsibility in the Middle East

Abstract

Men in the contemporary Middle East suffer from high rates of male infertility, and are generally willing to acknowledge their reproductive impairments. “Taking responsibility” for infertility means seeking a diagnosis, trying assisted reproductive technologies, and engaging in a retrospective process of etiological assessment. Infertile Middle Eastern men's etiological narratives reveal five perceived answers to the “why me?” question: heredity, illicit sex, war, stress, and pollution. Although only one of these factors --heredity --is routinely invoked in the biomedical literature on male infertility, at least three of the other factors may, in fact, be linked to men's infertility in the Middle East. To ameliorate these various factors would require many fundamental improvements in Middle Eastern social conditions, including the elimination of all forms of political violence and oppression. Furthermore, the Reproductive Health Initiative initiated in Cairo in 1994 has done little for the infertile men of the Middle East, as no direct health education programs or treatment services have been made widely available to them. Thus, Middle Eastern men must “take responsibility” for their infertility on their own, seeking out diagnoses, paying for private treatment, and acting as lay epidemiologists in their search for the root causes of their infertility. In the end, Middle Eastern men prove to be astute observers of the social conditions that have produced their reproductive life histories and embodied subjectivities.