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What Men Need to Know About Their Fertility
It’s not just a woman’s burden to bear
Khaled Kteily didn’t grow up dreaming about being the CEO of a sperm-freezing company. But an accident changed the course of his career — and his views on fertility. “In 2014, I got second-degree burns all over my leg that took over a month to heal,” Kteily says. “As a guy, your first instinct is to think, ‘Thank God that didn’t affect me anywhere more permanently.’”
After the accident, Kteily realized his ability to reproduce was more vulnerable than he once thought. “I’ve always imagined myself as a husband and father, and anything that changed that felt scary,” he says. Kteily, who was 25 at the time, wasn’t quite ready to have kids at that point—he still doesn’t have children—but he wanted to make sure he didn’t lose the opportunity.
So, that same year, he went to a local sperm bank, which he says was “the singular most awkward experience of his life,” mostly due to the lack of privacy in the process.
Kteily’s bad experience was one of the reasons he founded Legacy, a Harvard-incubated male fertility startup that provides at-home sperm testing and analysis kits, as well as the option to freeze your sperm. The sperm analysis process helps couples who are having trouble conceiving, and the sperm-freezing option helps maximize a…
