Looking around the ever-more-crowded globe, you might conclude that human sperm counts are just fine, thank you very much. Hitting the 7 billion mark as a species can lead to such conclusions. Yet that inference would counter what some involved in the field of endocrine-disruption research have long asserted: that sperm counts have, in fact, been dropping, and a Children of Men scenario of creakingly empty playground swings and absent children’s voices menaces the future of our species.  

We’ve got a lot of menaces, among them shifting climate and disease patterns, and what I’m just positive will turn into frontier-days water wars in South Texas in the coming decades. But what about that stolen future, that assault on the male that the first reports of falling sperm counts heralded two decades ago?