The MAKING of a FATHER

No sperms, no baby. That’s what biology books tell you. But when a man fathers a child after his semen analysis shows zero sperm count, what do you say? When 34-year-old Tony Singh (not his real name) and his 31-year-old wife gave birth to a healthy baby girl weighing short of a miracle for them. They had been trying to conceive for seven long trying to conceive for seven long years, and Singh’s semen report showed his sperm count to be nil.Thinking he could never have a biological baby, Singh approached Dr Anoop Kumar Gupta’s Delhi IVF& Infertility Clinic for artificial insemination using donor sperms.

Gupta, however, had other plans. “I told them that we could try to impregnate his wife using his own sperms which would be extracted from his testes.”This new procedure, called Intra-Cytoplasm Sperm Injection (ICSI), is used when the ejaculated semen contains no sperms or an amount insufficient to fertilise an egg. The ICSI technique benefits men who have a very low sperms count, very low motility or sperms of poor fertilizing ability, apart from those with no sperms in the ejaculate. The last condition could happen due to various reasons, including a congenital defect, an obstruction or testicular damage. A normal ejaculate contains 60 to 120 million sperms, though only one finally fertilise the egg. In Invitro Fertilisation (IVF), 50,000 motile, healthy sperms are taken and used to artificially inseminate an egg. Here, the sperms have to make an effort on their own to reach the egg. Micromanipulation is used if this technique fails, “with modern techniques and methods, the millions of sperms that nature provides are not required. A single sperms is all you need to fertilise an egg.” Says Dr Sushil K. Dubey, specialist, ART Micro-manipulation. The new ICSI technique is a step ahead. Here, too, one sperms is used to fertilise the egg artificially which is then implanted.