Male infertility is having a moment. A Gen Z–founded Silicon Valley start-up, The New York Times recently reported, wants to monetize “sperm racing”; the internet is full of advice on “spermmaxxing”; and last month Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. called the male fertility decline an “existential crisis,” claiming that in the 1970s, men had “twice the sperm count our teenage boys do today.” Last year he also asserted that “a teenager today has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man.”
Unsurprisingly, the HHS secretary’s facts were off: The study he relied on doesn’t specifically mention teenage boys, about whom there is not enough data to support such a claim; the threat is not an “existential” one; and the point about 68-year-old men is just made up (fertility absolutely does decline with age, even if our gerontocracy doesn’t want to believe it).
Still, he’s correct on the big picture: Some indicators suggest male fertility is declining. Sperm counts and sperm concentration declined worldwide by more than half between 1973 and 2018, according to one major data analysis. Many other studies show similar trends, although there are dissenting findings, and the issue remains somewhat controversial. One in 20 men face reduced fertility—hardly a reason to put humans on the endangered species list, but a legitimate public health concern and an understandable source of anxiety for those hoping to start families.
The issue has been preoccupying the right-wing manosphere for years, part of a collage of anxieties about masculinity that have fueled the rise of Trump. Sadly, Trump’s actual policies are poised to make the problem of male fertility decline much worse.
While researchers may not know exactly what’s behind the sperm count decline, they have identified some significant factors. A large body of research shows that water, air, and soil pollution is a huge factor in the drop in male fertility. Among pollutants, several of the biggest culprits are heavy metals, pesticides, dioxins, and phthalates. Towards the end of his term, President Biden imposed new rules on coal-fired power plants, limiting their freedom to dump arsenic, selenium, and mercury into the groundwater. Those heavy metals affect male sperm quality by disrupting endocrine functions and altering hormone levels. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to roll back that rule.
Not content to allow polluters to poison the water, the Trump administration, with Congress’s help, shredded much of the Clean Air Act last year, significantly weakening dioxin regulation. Dioxins, too, disrupt the endocrine system, with devastating impact on spermatogenesis—the development of sperm cells into sperm capable of fertilizing an egg.
Given the link between air pollution and male infertility, it is not surprising that wildfires, which have a horrendous impact on air quality, directly affect male reproductive health. Researchers at the University of Washington who studied male sperm counts in the wildfire-ridden years from 2018 to 2022, found that sperm count and quality declined consistently during every major wildfire year. Trump’s EPA has specifically rejected climate as a legitimate reason for regulating air pollution. That means that numerous Biden-era regulations intended to ease climate change have been rolled back, a policy trend almost certain to make the climate crisis much worse, and to make climate disasters like wildfires even more frequent. In addition, Trump’s anti-immigration, anti-DEI policies—burdensome bureaucratic paperwork requirements forcing agencies to show that they are complying with the administration’s bans on diversity hiring and immigration restrictions—are weakening our ability as a society to fight and prevent such fires, by complicating and delaying the grants localities receive for that purpose. His cuts to the U.S. Forest Service—thousands lost their jobs in the DOGE rampage, and another bloodbath is underway with a “restructuring” this year closing many regional offices and research facilities—are likely to make matters even worse.
Then there is the administration’s lenient stance on pesticides, which 21 different studies over the last 20 years have shown reduce the sperm quality of male mice and rats. The Trump administration has angered even its MAHA base through its indulgent attitude toward pesticide manufacturers—particularly after it sided with Bayer, the maker of Roundup, in a Supreme Court case. Glyphosate, the chemical in Roundup, is associated with reduced sperm motility, among many other health problems.
“Forever chemicals,” so called because they are pollutants that persist in the environment and in our bodies for an alarmingly long time, also present a well-documented threat to sperm. PFAS, the most common type of these—found in drinking water, food, firefighting gear, and soccer fields, to name a few sources—disrupt hormones and endocrine functions and harm sperm quality, viability, and also ability to swim, which is called “motility.” Biden established the first-ever nationwide limits on PFAS in drinking water, a rule that the Trump EPA now wants to roll back.
Then there are phthalates, plasticizers, and so-called “everywhere chemicals,” because they are everywhere in our households and daily lives. Researchers in the U.K. found that exposure to phthalates slowed sperm motility and caused the resulting DNA to fragment, an effect that worsened with each additional dose. The Trump administration did study the problem and announce a plan to regulate workplace exposure to phthalates—good—but troublingly, in a move widely criticized by scientists and public health advocates, announced that it wouldn’t regulate phthalates in household or other consumer goods.
What’s curious about this apparent contradiction between stated concern and policy is that the pollution threat is no secret on the right. Kennedy and other MAGA-friendly influencers do correctly blame pesticides, endocrine disrupters, what RFK Jr. calls “the toxic soup” surrounding us all. But they talk about it without acknowledging how Trump’s pro-polluter policies are exacerbating the situation.
Instead, RFK Jr. and others in the manosphere concerned about male fertility want to let the government off the hook, turning men’s fertility into an individual problem. Some offer wacky remedies, like putting your testicles in ice water or refraining from ejaculating (as men did in Victorian times and seem to be trying again. That won’t work. There is no advantage in storing it up for later). Other solutions to masculinity concerns peddled in the manosphere are manifestly ill advised for those concerned about fertility, like taking testosterone, which has been shown to harm sperm.
RFK and others also emphasize that leading a healthy lifestyle helps your fertility: good nutrition, exercising, reducing alcohol and nicotine use, and maintaining a healthy weight. That’s true! But such advice doesn’t address the significant environmental harms men are suffering at the population level—only cracking down on polluters can do that.
Democrats wring their hands about young male voters, who swung toward Trump in the last presidential election. But Democratic politicians rarely talk about fertility concerns, which is odd because their record on regulating the pollution that most affects male fertility is much better than Trump’s, to the point that they could directly point to Biden’s policies as a contrast. Perhaps they don’t want to come off as cringe, as Democrats so often do when trying to communicate with either young people or men. But by not talking about it, Democrats risk ceding the anxieties associated with the issue to far-right Republicans, the very group guaranteed to make it worse.