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Hello, I'm Natasha Faroze and this is Spectator Out Loud. Each week we ask a few of the writers from the magazine to read their pieces.

This week we've got Stuart Ritchie asking how worried we should be about falling sperm counts.

Mary Wakefield writes about making memories and Toby Young on his Airbnb disaster.

First up, Stuart Ritchie.

Seed of Doubt, how worried should we be about falling sperm counts?

Here's a jolly thought to start the year. Humanity is on its way to extinction due to a drastic decline in sperm counts.

Men's reproductive health is in such a powerless state that it won't be long until nobody can conceive a child unassisted. That, anyway, is the argument that's now become a perennial.

Every year or so, most recently just at the end of 2022, a new sperm counting study emerges

and reignites the fears that were biologically condemned to extinction.

How anxious should we be? Here's the story so far. In 1992, a seminal study was published in the

British Medical Journal that claimed to show evidence for decreasing quality of semen during the

past 50 years. It was a meta-analysis, a review paper

that gathered together all relevant studies that measured sperm count since 1938, lining up the

results to discern any trends. The conclusion was that the average sperm count had fallen from

113 million per milliliter, the standard unit in this field,

in the early 20th century, to 66 million per milliliter by the 1990s.

The study was torn to pieces. There simply isn't a fair comparison, other researchers noted,

between 1940s and 1990s equipment for measuring sperm count, the latter being far more accurate.

Not only that, but there was very little data available for the first 30 years of the analysis.

Samples from a mere 184 men were included, so the comparison across time was murky.

Critics reanalyzed the data and found no evidence of a decline in sperm count

...