In the third round table programme we spoke about the future. The theme: “Infertility tomorrow: prevent or cure?”
On 6 June, on the occasion of fertility awareness week (from June 4 to 10, 2018), we organized in Paris, in partnership with Doctissimo and the association Collectif BAMP, half a day of discussions led by Marc Tronchot, the former editor in chief of the Europe 1 network. As a central theme of this event, there was an issue that concerns all of us directly or indirectly, namely, the desire to have a baby. Our goal: to raise awareness, inform and reflect!
If you haven’t yet read the article from the first round table, there is a debate on the question: Is the desire to have a baby stronger than anything else?, which you can read here. And for the second article on “origin and filiation: what to communicate?”, You can find it here.
The third round table was firmly focused on the future. Its theme: “Infertility tomorrow: prevent or cure?”
Or, to put it another way: could certain forms of infertility be prevented? Can our unconscious influence our fertility? What does research in epigenetics tell us about infertility and about the mother-child bond? All crucial questions which four experts have answered:
- André Cicolella, chemist and toxicologist, president of Environmental Health Network. Author of Toxic Planet and Breast Cancer: Ending the Epidemic(unpublished in Spain).
- Joëlle Desjardins-Simon, psychoanalyst, author of Unconscious locks of fertility (unpublished in Spain).
- Ariane Giacobino, medical geneticist, associate professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, member of the Swiss, European and American societies of human genetics, author of Can we free ourselves from genes? (unpublished in Spain).
- Catherine Rongières, gynaecologist-obstetrician, coordinator of the ethics committee of the gynaecology department in Strasbourg.
From this exchange, we will remain with the undisputed confirmation of the latest international studies, which indicate that the quality of sperm has diminished by 30% in recent years. The causes, according to André Cicolella, lie in “the Western way of life, and in particular the endocrine disruptors or phthalates, which have invaded our modern world (bottles, preserves, cosmetics, etc.).”
An undeniable environmental impact that is also confirmed by epigenetics (a discipline that seeks to understand the influence of the environment on the innate). For this science, living conditions have an impact on the way our genes work and on the appearance of diseases: “exposure to phthalates has been shown to have an impact on fertility or on the prevalence of urogenital malformations, for example,” she says. Dr. Giacobino, who goes even further, adds that “certain traumas can also induce changes in the genes”.
This theory is in line with the opinion of Dr. Desjardins-Simon. For her, who has worked with infertile couples for 20 years, “infertility is sometimes one of the symptoms that arises from the unconscious (…) psychoanalysis allows us to then reintroduce the human in the history of couples, release the word and move away from patterns that can become consolidated in a transgenerational way (…) it thus seeks to explore a story that can turn into a threat upon becoming a mother or father”.
For Dr. Catherine Rongières, the way forward also lies in ovarian self-preservation: “the decline in women’s fertility is somewhat programmed, although women no longer have children at 24 years of age. To be able to access self-preservation is to give them an extra opportunity. “To this she adds that “it is not because they want to develop a brilliant career that women decide to preserve their fertility. They choose this option because they have not found a partner, or because the other person is not ready to have a baby. ”
To find out more, Eugin invites you to live -or to relive- this third round table and to discover the sometimes conflicting opinion of Nathalie and Hugues on the question of the self-preservation of oocytes and environmental risks.
The link to the testimony in French: https://1drv.ms/v/s!AtTPZwyxtHBwrCrr68vIORgv9Bmc
The link to the full conference in French: https://1drv.ms/v/s!AtTPZwyxtHBwrCxYGtWZQTgvPRyP
