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Premarital medical tests spreading as Japanese tie the knot later

News Desk (Kyodo News)
Tokyo
Mon, August 27, 2018

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Premarital medical tests spreading as Japanese tie the knot later More and more people are undergoing premarital medical examinations in Japan as an increasing number of couples struggle with infertility due to late marriages. (Shutterstock/File)

M

ore and more people are undergoing premarital medical examinations in Japan as an increasing number of couples struggle with infertility due to late marriages.

While many people view checkups positively, as a way to detect health problems at an early stage, some experts are concerned that reproductive capacity could be used as criteria for selecting marriage partners -- eventually leading to a problem of eugenics.

The contents of premarital checkups vary depending on institutions but packaged services often include blood tests, checks for sexually transmitted diseases, rubella antibody tests and uterus cancer or semen tests. The fees are not covered by national health insurance.

According to Recruit Marketing Partners Co., 59 percent of 187 women surveyed in 2011 were aware of premarital health checkups and 24 percent actually took them.

Many cited concerns about their health as reasons for taking health examinations. One respondent said the result of a checkup showing no abnormality provided a sense of relief while another said it helped find diseases early.

Fertility is understood to decline in line with age for men and women and delayed marriages have pushed up the number of people struggling with infertility.

More than one in three couples said they were concerned about potential infertility, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. The body said the number of couples who have undergone fertility checks or treatment is also on the rise.

Akira Tsujimura, a professor in the urology department at Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital, said that although most people who have premarital health checkups are women, medical tests for men are also drawing attention.

"It has come to be widely known that about half of infertility cases are attributable to male partners," said Tsujimura, who has conducted premarital health checkups for men at an outside clinic.

Read also: Tokyo seems best place to meet, but high in single rate

According to a report compiled by Tsujimura, of 564 men aged between 21 and 66 who underwent semen tests, 25.4 percent had a low sperm count or poor sperm mobility and 1.8 percent had azoospermia -- a medical condition where a man's semen contains no sperm.

"It is better to know (about health conditions) in advance because thinking about whether or not you should have children affects your life plan," he said.

But Jun Murotsuki, the head of the obstetrics department at Miyagi Children's Hospital, said, "From past examples abroad, we cannot deny the eugenic aspects (of such medical examinations). It is problematic to go through health checkups without being aware of (such issues)."

In France, premarital health checkups were previously mandatory based on a eugenic policy, though it was later abolished. China also scrapped obligatory premarital health examinations.

Murotsuki added that revealing diseases or infertility could create problems and pointed out that counseling is not readily available in Japan.

"If people want to undergo tests themselves they can do so but I am concerned about cases in which families and partners force it and make it a condition for marriage," he said.

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