My husband's BATTLE TO BE A DAD

With a rare condition, could Jenna Greenaway's partner father children?

When trying to start a family, infertility is a frightening prospect. So often, it's considered to be a 'woman's issue'. And with a seemingly endless list of factors affecting women's reproductive systems, from hormones to ovarian cysts, it's an understandable assumption. But when my husband Shaun and I had trouble conceiving, we discovered that in our case, those assumptions couldn't be further from the truth.

I met Shaun, then 26, at policing school in 2008. In the same class, we found ourselves in a tight-knit group of friends, and it wasn't until we left the following year that we confessed our feelings and started a relationship. Married in 2013, we were in no rush to have children, our free time outside of our police careers taken up with travelling, going to gigs, snowboarding and cycling. I loved being the fun auntie to my sister's children, happy to just enjoy our newly married life. But four years on, we finally felt ready to start a family of our own.

Fertility tests

In 2017, it felt like everyone around us was having children. But after months of trying, we still weren’t getting any closer to becoming parents. Almost a year into trying in December 2017, we decided to go to our GP for fertility tests. Shaun already had a sneaking suspicion that our fertility problems were down to him – he’d suffered from mumps just after finishing university in his early 20s, and had heard that it can impact men’s ability to have children. Sure enough, my tests came back clear and after weeks of waiting, in January 2018 Shaun was finally called by his GP receptionist while at work and given a diagnosis of azoospermia. It was only when Shaun got home and started googling that the seriousness of the diagnosis dawned on us – he had no sperm whatsoever.