Fertility study in France

Press, 27 January 1978, Page 6

Fertility study in France

PA Paris Thousands of French couples are being asked to take part in a research project aimed at finding out the best time for lovemaking if you want have a baby.

Scientists, trying to establish the reasons why one couple in five finds it difficult to have a child, are hoping to enrol volunteer couples so that they can study the reasons for this temporary sterility. When in the monthlycycle is a woman most likely to conceive? How often should couples have intercourse? These are some of the questions that the research . team is seeking to answer. French medical experts said that until recently a couple's inability to have

children was automatically blamed on infertility of the wife. Now scientists know that the cause can just as often lie with the man. One member of the research team said: “It is very rare that either partner is totally sterile. Much more frequently one or other of them just has a low fertility level.” It is to find out how to help such couples that the project was started. The researchers are asking for the co-operation of couples who have just stopped using a contraceptive method, or who are planning to do so in order to have a child. Volunteers throughout the country will be asked

to fill in a detailed questionnaire to include the medical histories of both partners. The wife will also be asked to take her body temperature regularly until conception is confirmed, and to mark down on a sheet of paper the dates and times she has intercourse. Parisian couples wil oe encouraged to take part in a more detailed study over a two-month observation period during which doctors will determine the wife's probable date of ovulation and try to predict the best time to make love. Husbands will also undergo two sperm tests to measure their level of fertility. In fact, medical

experts are divided on whether frequent intercourse is the best way of ensuring conception; or whether, on the contrary, making love often diminishes the husband’s sperm count and in fact lessens a couple’s chances of becoming parents.

Fertility is a major political theme in France — one of Western Europe’s most thinly populated countries — w'here nationalist politicians issue frequent warnings of the dangers of a falling birthrate.

In the early 19705, the Gaullist Labour Minister, Joseph Fontanet, even went so far as to urge his countrymen to step up breeding.

He complained that, if they had been as fertile as their European neighbours in the last two centuries, there would be 97M Frenchmen today instead of some 52M at last count,