When to Consider Sperm Banking

For whatever reason, family-building is off the table at the moment, but you certainly want to preserve the option for down the road. For men who want to take part in fertility preservation, sperm banking is the best path forward.

To help preserve your ability to father children in the future, our team at NOVA IVF, including Meera Shah, MD, and Richard Schmidt, MD, can help with sperm banking.

To give you an idea of when you might consider sperm banking — a process in which we collect and freeze samples of your sperm — we’ve outlined a few of the more common reasons below.

Preserving your in vitro fertilization tools

If you and your partner are considering in vitro fertilization (IVF), you understand that we fertilize an embryo outside of the woman’s body, using eggs that are harvested and sperm that’s donated.

In many cases, once we harvest your partner’s eggs, we can use your live sperm to fertilize these eggs.

But there are times you may not be able to donate your sperm when the eggs are ready. Perhaps you travel a bit or you’re facing uncertain fertility. In these cases, we can bank your sperm so that when we harvest the eggs, we have viable sperm with which to work.

And if you have issues with your fertility, such as sperm with poor motility or low sperm counts, we can preserve samples and isolate your viable sperm for future fertilization.

In other words, having all the IVF ingredients at the ready, as well as backups in terms of banked sperm, can be helpful.

Cancer treatments

If you’re about to undergo cancer treatments that could affect the viability of your sperm, we can take samples pre-treatment and bank them for future use.

Undergoing a vasectomy

While it may seem counterintuitive to bank sperm if you’re about to have a vasectomy, many men choose to preserve their fertility just in case there are life changes and family building is back on the table.

For the moment, your vasectomy is the best choice for your lifestyle, but with sperm banking, you do have options down the road.

Aging

Another reason some men choose sperm banking is to preserve sperm while they’re young and their sperm is healthiest. If you’re getting older and your desired family unit still isn’t in place, sperm banking offers you a backup should you fail to conceive when the time is right to father a child, no matter your age.

Ultimately, the reasons for banking sperm vary considerably, but the one thing that holds true across the board is that sperm preservation is effective and easy.

If you’d like to explore sperm banking further, please contact our office in Mountain VIew, California, to set up a consultation.