Smoking is a real scourge. Nearly half of women of childbearing age smoke and a third are still addicted early in their pregnancy. However, "tobacco precipitates the age of menopause, explains Professor Wolf (1).It causes vascular micro-traumas which, for women as for men, affect the vessels, the heart, etc. » Its misdeeds, adds Dr. Epelboin (2), “potentiate other fertility abnormalities. In a woman, they reduce the chances of implantation by playing on the ovarian reserve early on. » Some drugs also play a deleterious role. This is, for example, the instructive case of Distilbène, marketed in the 1950s to fight against miscarriages. Distilbène has been banned in France since 1977, but its harmful effects still reverberate, even if their impact is lighter and better controlled.
In 2008, "Males in Danger", a remarkable survey conducted by Sylvie Gilman and Thierry de Lestrade across Europe (2), demonstrated how chemical substances in the daily environment - plastics, pesticides, chemical components... - disrupt our endocrine system. "These products act directly on spermatogenesis," says Professor Wolf. Their harmfulness has been proven since the 1990s, but their harmful effects began more than fifty years ago, with their intensive use. »
Psychoanalyst Joëlle Desjardins-Simon (3) has worked for more than fifteen years in a medically assisted procreation service (PMA). She found that the vast majority of couples followed suffer from unexplained infertility. In these cases, unconscious factors are sometimes at work:"It may be trauma from personal history, the bond with parents, the place one occupied in one's siblings... » Even when the biological parameters are correct, and in spite of extremely specialized techniques, there still remains more than 75% failure in the PMA process. "If infertility is mainly assumed by women, continues the psychoanalyst, I have been able to demonstrate over the years that it is always caught up in the dynamics of the couple, at the crossroads of two stories:a woman who encounters a number of problems because of her history to become a mother will "coincidentally" choose a companion for whom paternity is prevented for reasons of her own. It is also frequent that traumas inherited from previous generations come, even without the knowledge of the couple and despite their desire for children, to prevent the realization of this desire. » Hence the importance of talking, talking and talking. To her man, to girlfriends, to a shrink… Because it can change everything.
1. Head of the reproductive biology histology-embryology department at Cochin Hospital in Paris.
2. Obstetrician gynecologist and reproductive physician at the Bichat-Claude Bernard Hospital Group in Paris.
3. Europa Prize 2008.
4. Author, with Sylvie Debras, of “The Unconscious Locks of Fertility, Éditions Albin Michel, 2010.
