She writes: "Having children is extremely important to me, but if it turned out that he couldn't have them, I'd work around it, i.e., adoption or sperm donation."

Either it's a deal-breaker or not.

I suspect if she found out he was sterile, she would not wind up marrying him.

I thought the same thing. Otherwise, why is it SO IMPORTANT to find out before getting married? Of course he is nervous about getting tested; and the more she pressures the more he'll suspect she's going to leave him. She needs to at least be honest with herself.

Finding out the answer to this issue doesn't require a "battery of tests", because the potential problem is with a man. The test requires one (1) sperm sample and one (1) minute with a microscope. It's the same test that's done after every vasectomy. The test is cheap, simple, and straightforward. Either he's making a normal number of sperm, or he's not.

Fertility screening for women is much more complicated, and carries health risks from iodine-based dyes (used to see whether the fallopian tubes are blocked) and other procedures. But a quick check on a man is really quite trivial. In fact, your average second-year biology student could perform this test with an acceptable degree of reliability.

I suspect that the man feels rejected over these requests. He may also have a 'fertility fetish', which is not unusual, and consequently believes that knowing he is "shooting blanks" would be a turn-off. But given the low physical and financial cost of the test, the woman's request doesn't seem disproportionate to me.

the test is easy. The conversation is not.

$50 says he doesn't even know how "extremely" she feels about anything.

As the others above posted, the issue here isn't about the test but about her need for the results. She says she doeesn't care about the results but she needs to know the results. That just isn't logical.

Hey, I can understand if she doesn't wish to marry someone that cannot have kids, but she needs to be honest with herself. If she really feels it doesn't matter if the guy is sterile or NOT than there is NO need for a test before they get married. NONE.

If she doesn't wish to marry somone that is sterile than she should be honest and tell him that and require a test before marriage. If that breaks them up, so be it.

But her current POV isn't acceptable.

I'd be reluctant to marry a guy who insisted I get a sonogram to prove I have ovaries, or wanted me to see the OB/GYN to see if my hymen were intact, or anything else which indicated he might value me less if I didn't match his preconceived notion of what is acceptable.* I think the man would feel justified to see it the same way with her insistence that he prove he is "functional" before marrying her.

* I would understand the guy wanting a genetic test, if his family had a history of some genetic disease, to ensure we weren't both carriers. That way he could know in advance whether he wanted to risk having children with me or not.

I tend to agree that she's not being fully honest with herself, and that her current position is really unfair to her fiance. I think she needs to take some time to really let the possible scenarios play out in her mind - assume he is infertile, and really sit with it and see if she really is ok with that, or not. It may really not be. She owes it to herself and to him to be honest about that fact.

That said, I can understand why the uncertainty is hard for her if it's really a pretty good chance that he's infertile (as opposed to a very small chance). We went through a period where we thought that we wouldn't be able to have biological children. It turned out to be incorrect, when we finally went for a second opinion, but that news was hard at the time and we both went through something akin to grief, though obviously not as intense - it was like grieving the idea, somehow, and it was really sad, even though we were both also open to considering adoption or possibly some sort of sperm donation. So, I can imagine that being unsure could be disconcerting in the sense of not knowing whether to let yourself really go through that process of letting go of an idea that you had really wanted or not.

But, we were also clear that we married each other to be with each other, and I think she needs to get herself clear on whether that's true for her and her fiance or not.