Fears over falling human sperm count in Western countries may be overblown

Fear sells and accelerates careers! Scientists know that too and are all too human! Western men fear not! 😄

This Harvard University article contains some strange language based on phony ideologies almost rendering the outcome of this research as dubious:

"... The [Harvard University] GenderSci Lab team warned that this kind of Eurocentric focus has been used by alt-right, white supremacist, and men’s rights activists to argue that the health and fertility of men in Western nations is being threatened, particularly by feminist and anti-racist movements. ..."

"... Richardson and her colleagues found that earlier research claimed causal links between declining sperm counts and declining fertility, as well as between exposures to certain environmental chemicals and lower sperm counts. The GenderSci Lab researchers found that neither of these assumptions are supported by scientific or geographic evidence. ..."

"The past 50 years have seen heated debate in the reproductive sciences about global trends in human sperm count. In 2017, Levine and colleagues published the largest and most methodologically rigorous meta-regression analysis to date and reported that average total sperm concentration among men from ‘Western’ countries has decreased by 59.3% since 1973, with no sign of halting. ...
we identify weaknesses and inconsistencies in the Sperm Count Decline hypothesis (SCD), and propose an alternative framework to guide research on sperm count trends: the Sperm Count Biovariability hypothesis (SCB). SCB asserts that sperm count varies within a wide range, much of which can be considered non-pathological and species-typical."

Fears over falling human sperm count may be overblown – Harvard Gazette Team sees flaws in influential paper, embrace of claims by interest groups

Here is the link to the underlying research article:

The future of sperm: a biovariability framework for understanding global sperm count trends