STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Sweden is facing an acute shortage of sperm for assisted pregnancy as potential donors avoid hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic, stopping insemination in large parts of the health system and increasing waiting times by years.
“We are running out of sperm. We have never had so few donors as in the last year, ”said Ann Thurin Kjellberg, head of the breeding unit at Gothenburg University Hospital.
The lack has meant that the waiting time for assisted pregnancy has increased from about six months to about 30 months in the last year, possibly longer, doctors familiar with Reuters said.
“It’s stressful that we can’t get a clear date or date for treatment,” said Elin Bergsten, a 28-year-old math teacher from southern Sweden.
Two years ago, Bergsten and her husband found out that she was unable to produce semen, and the couple immediately requested the assisted pregnancy. She had to have a second insemination cycle before treatment could be delayed indefinitely due to shortages.
“It’s a national phenomenon,” said Thurin Kjellberg. “We are exhausted in Gothenburg and Malmo, they will soon be exhausted in Stockholm,” she added, naming the three most populated areas of the country.
In addition to public health care providers, there are also private clinics in Sweden that are able to circumvent the shortage by buying semen from abroad.
But assisted pregnancy treatment often costs up to 100,000 kronor ($ 11,785), making it inaccessible to many. Assisted pregnancy is free of charge within the Swedish National Health Service.
The Nordic countries and Belgium have the highest rates of assisted conception in the world, in terms of the availability of cycles per million population, according to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.
According to Swedish law, a semen sample can only be used by a maximum of 6 women. Most donated sperm from Sweden have 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 breeding unit at Skane University Hospital, Sweden’s largest such clinic, said it takes about 8 months to process a donor due to the many tests involved and that many samples fail to become viable donations from the cause of common frost problems.
“If you have 50 men contacting you, at best only half of them could be donors,” Kitlinski said.
Some Swedish regions have resorted to social networks to encourage potential male donors, but with different results. Meanwhile, the lack persists.
“We have to go on TV and tell Swedish men to show up,” said Thurin Kjellberg.
(1 $ = 8.4850 Swedish kronor)
Reporting by Colm Fulton; Editing by Niklas Pollard and Jan Harvey