Career-driven Indians bank sperm for midlife families

INDIA: Pressure to perform in India's expanding job market has led to a surge of young male executives making deposits at sperm banks so they can have children later in life, reports said Sunday.

Many men who want to advance in India's fast-growing economy have decided that long hours at the office make it impossible to follow traditional social norms such as early marriage, according to a separate international survey.

The Times of India said more than half the long-term frozen semen samples now being received at Delhi's solitary commercial sperm bank, Cryogenie, were from healthy young men unwilling to procreate until they are professionally well-established.

"Over the last three years, the trend of healthy young men coming in to get their semen stored has really gone up," Cryogenie chief Iqbal Mehdi told the daily.

"Right now, between 50 and 60 percent of our long-term frozen samples are from healthy individuals," said Mehdi. Cryogenie, which stores sperm in liquid nitrogen at temperatures of minus 192 degrees Celsius (-313.6 degrees Fahrenheit), said it charges 3,000 rupees (66.5 dollars) to preserve samples indefinitely.

Health experts confirmed the trend of "career-oriented" men putting family plans on hold in favour of career goals.

"Four or five years ago, no healthy individual would go in for freezing sperm but now with career concerns being very important, the option is being taken up," said Ashok Khurana, a New Delhi-based fertility consultant.

Other experts said the trend among Indian women to freeze eggs, or embryos, was less visible, despite expanding opportunities for both men and women in India.

Many of the hundreds of thousands of new jobs have come from India's leap into the global arena as a hub for software and services such as outsourced call centres, accounting and medical consulting.

But many of the new jobs require overnight shifts to serve customers in the United States and Europe, and this means drastic lifestyle changes.

As a result job-related tension has changed social mores in which parents had pushed their children to get married by age 28, especially for males.

A survey conducted by global market research agency ACNielsen last month said that in the past decade 79 percent of Indians chose the 30s as the right age for a wedding. "The new generation is more career-oriented and is reluctant to assume other responsibilities before their career objectives are fulfilled," said Sarang Panchal, executive director of ACNielson's South Asian chapter.

Marriage is less important for career-oriented young Indians, and only 53 percent of respondents consider marriage a "life goal," one of the lowest in the Asia Pacific region, Panchal said.

New Delhi, Monday, AFP