Advice to the Childless

The estimated five million U.S. couples who want children but don't seem to be able to have them were offered a lot of expert advice last week. Unfortunately, the experts did not entirely agree.

Writing in Fertility in Marriage (Farrar, Straus; $3), Dr. Louis Portnoy of Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital put his faith in the basal temperature curve, which drops lower each month at about the time an ovum (egg) is released by the ovary, then rises sharply again, thus marking the most favorable time for conception. This is nonsense, snaps Dr. Edmond J. Farris--no M.D., but an anatomist (Ph.D.) who has trodden on many a medical toe with his hobnailed views.

The basal temperature chart, Dr. Farris concedes, in his Human Fertility and Problems of the Male (The Author's Press, White Plains, $5), has some value in determining the most likely time for conception. But he insists that it is often inaccurate, that its use may hinder, rather than help, conception. The most accurate way to find out when an egg is about to be released, says Dr. Farris, is to use a test he developed as head of Philadelphia's Wistar Institute of Anatomy & Biology.

In the Farris method, two immature female white rats are injected with the woman's urine each day. Then the rats are killed. The time when the woman's ovum will be released is predicted by observing the reddening of the rats' ovaries. With that knowledge, a physician can advise a couple when to have relations with the best chance of causing conception--sometimes fixing the time as precisely as a six-to-twelve-hour period, Dr. Farris claims. Some extreme examples: one man left a board meeting, at which he was being elected executive vice president of his company, when he noticed that the time had come; a woman broke up her own tea party with the announcement that she had to go to conceive.

Many of Dr. Farris' other findings would be almost as startling to doctors and laymen alike. Among them:

P:The wife is usually not to blame for involuntary childlessness; two-thirds of the time it is the husband who is responsible.

P:Only 40% of men are highly fertile and unlikely ever to have difficulty in causing conception; 35% to 40% are relatively fertile, but will have fewer children than they may want; 20% to 25% are sub fertile or infertile and will probably never become fathers.

P:Emotional disturbances in men are not a major cause of infertility.

P:Vitamins and hormones generally have no value in increasing fertility*; the only measures Dr. Farris recommends (though many doctors differ) are X-ray treatments of the pituitary gland to stimulate production of spermatozoa.

One of the greatest difficulties in treating childless couples is not medical but just stubborn male pride. Many men refuse to believe that they may be to blame and will not submit to examination or treatment. Last week, the publishers of Human Fertility and Problems of the Male were doing a humming business in mail orders from laymen. But not one writer admitted that he wanted the book for himself. It was always a cousin or a brother or a friend who needed it.

*But diet may. The University of Chicago's famed Physiologist Anton J. Carlson reported last week that rats fed an abnormally rich diet and mated late in life became subfertile after the first generation; rats on leaner diets were better able to maintain their numbers. It was, said "Ajax" Carlson, something for the human upper classes to ponder.

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