...surely we can't be the first? There must already be a charity focused on sperm health & tackling male infertility?
Well it turns out even though there are some fantastic support groups, campaigns, companies, and podcasts from what we can see... Swimmers is the world's first male infertility charity.
Even though we would be incredible proud to carry this mantle - we would also happily be challenged on it and learn that there was someone else fighting for our cause before we got here!
So this begs the question... why did we start the first male infertility charity?
3 reasons.
(1) I have 'unexplained' male subfertility. Basically my sperm health isn't what it should be, and we don't know why. There are many other men who are in limbo like I am. We're in 2024, that's not good enough.
(2) After we undertook IVF to pursue our goal of becoming parents, we got stuck in and discovered we were part of something much bigger than just us. Between 1973 and 2018 among selected men from all contintents, mean sperm count declined by 51.6%. Global sperm health is on a massive decline.
(3) We knew that this was going to be a defining problem of our times and whilst there were some people doing some excellent things in the space - there wasn't a dedicated charitable cause that could support all of that... and achieve much more.
This is just the start - restoring global sperm health is a mammoth mission, but the journey starts with one step (and a blog post).