STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Sweden faces acute sperm shortage for assisted pregnancy as prospective donors avoid hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic, halting inseminations in many areas of healthcare and increasing waiting times by years
‘We’re out of sperm. We have never had so few donors as last year, ”said Ann Thurin Kjellberg, head of the reproduction unit at Gothenburg University Hospital.
The shortage has spiked waiting times for assisted pregnancy from about six months to an estimated 30 months over the past year, possibly longer, doctors familiar with the matter told Reuters.
“It’s stressful that we can’t get a clear time or date for treatment,” said Elin Bergsten, a 28-year-old math teacher from southern Sweden.
Two years ago, Bergsten and her husband discovered that he could not produce sperm, and the couple immediately filed for an assisted pregnancy. She would undergo her second insemination cycle before her treatment was indefinitely delayed due to the shortage.
“It’s a national phenomenon,” said Thurin Kjellberg. “We are running out in Gothenburg and Malmö, they will soon run out in Stockholm,” she added, citing the country’s three most populous areas.
In addition to public healthcare providers, there are also private clinics in Sweden that can avoid shortages by purchasing semen from abroad.
But assisted pregnancy treatment there often costs as much as SEK 100,000 ($ 11,785), making it unaffordable for many. Assisted pregnancy is free within Sweden’s national health service.
According to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, the Nordic countries and Belgium have the highest rates of assisted conception in the world, in terms of cycle availability per million inhabitants.
According to Swedish law, a semen sample may only be used by a maximum of 6 women. Most of the donated sperm in Sweden has reached this legal capacity, which means that in many areas assisted pregnancy is only available to women who have previously used a specific sperm sample.
Margareta Kitlinski, who runs the reproduction unit at Skane University Hospital, the largest clinic in Sweden, said it takes about 8 months to process a donor due to the many tests involved, and many samples are not viable. donations are due to common frostbite problems.
“If you have 50 men contacting you, at most half of them could be donors,” Kitlinski said.
Some Swedish regions have used social media to encourage potential male donors, but with mixed results. Meanwhile, the shortage persists.
“We have to go on TV and tell Swedish men to come forward,” said Thurin Kjellberg.
($ 1 = 8.4850 Swedish kronor)
Reporting by Colm Fulton; Edited by Niklas Pollard and Jan Harvey