Is there a big difference between frozen and fresh sperm?

M&MBride0506 · January 2011

My sister cannot use my hubby's fresh sperm because according to my RE there is a law about having it quarantined for six months because my sister isn't married to my hubby, (if it were me doing the iui we would be able to use fresh sperm) but I was just wondering if using fresh sperm increases the chances of success with an iui? Thanks

Yellow_Daisy · January 2011

We used a donor and it sounds like they are treating your DH's sperm like a donor with the 6 mo quarantine. Frozen sperm is not as hardy, it tends to live a much shorter duration 12-24 hrs whereas fresh sperm can live 5 days. When we did IUIs our clinic required that we do B2B because we were using frozen donor sperm. I know that is not the case with all clinics, but my RE felt it increased the odds of success.

madelyn07 · January 2011

Yes, frozen sperm isn't as good as fresh when it comes to an IUI. The freezing and thawing process can negatively affect the sperm. It isn't an issue with IVF like it is with IUI.

Our RE said she would do an IUI with frozen sperm if we had to but she wouldn't recommend it. We decided we didn't want to...we didn't want to go through all of that and spend all that money (totally OOP) and then have our chances decreased due to having to use frozen sperm. (For example, we considered freezing DH's sperm so I could do IUIs during his season while he is constantly on the road but we decided it wasn't worth it for us--we took an 8 month break last year for his season instead..so that we'd only use fresh sperm.)

M&MBride0506 · January 2011

Thanks ladies!!!

chizzle09 · January 2011

My husband travels a lot-he's gone almost 9 months out of the year for his job. I've done 4 iui's and the last 2 were with frozen. They definitely don't live as long but I got pregnant with my first injects cycle/iui #4 with frozen sperm. And with 10% motility, too!! It ended up an ectopic though. For IVF it really doesn't matter. My husband will more than likely be out of town for my IVF in February so we are using frozen sperm. My RE told me there was no difference between fresh and frozen.

babylove0511 · January 2011

frozen is not as good as fresh with iui since they don't live as long. would you be doing a back to back?

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