I don't believe we have any conformation on when the pregnancy issues started, but it is entirely possible that the gas used in the purge caused them. Can anyone with chemistry/medical knowledge confirm this?

There has never been a mention of it, but the island does seem to mess with the healing properties based on whether or not you pissed the island off. Maybe The Purge pissed the island off and that is causing the infertility. I mean, we know that Ben has lost the favor of the island and had to have Jack perform surgery on him.

...about the healing properties of the Island...

...they do seem to heal at a faster rate than usual, right?

SOME people heal fast, i.e Locke should be in a wheelchair but can now walk, same as Rose's cancer but it did nothing for the likes of Boone or anyone else that died after a non lethal but obviously life threatening wound, and of course Ben had his cancer which laid him out for longer than he expected post-op plus the Others have the fertility issues. It wouldn't surprise me if the toxins from the gas had an effect but it seems weird that nobody has made the connection on screen.

That's a great theory. But I don't think that it's it: it's a much more mysterious reason, I believe.

Of course, it could always be NANOBOTS!

Good theory -

I don't think they ever mentioned about the infertility problem the DHARMA initiative was having when Ben and Richard were initially going to the island. Anyone know?

I liked the idea that Ben pissed off the island and that is what is causing the infertility problem, although I think it'll be much more complex than that. But it would explain why Ben no longer has the same 'healing powers' that Locke/Rose have.

Good theory -

I don't think they ever mentioned about the infertility problem the DHARMA initiative was having when Ben and Richard were initially going to the island. Anyone know?

I liked the idea that Ben pissed off the island and that is what is causing the infertility problem, although I think it'll be much more complex than that. But it would explain why Ben no longer has the same 'healing powers' that Locke/Rose have.

Remember when Lcoke seemed to be going off-course of the island's deisres and his legs started to go...leading to Boone dying...leading Locke to bang on the hatch door...leading to the light coming up through the hatch.

The island gives and takes it's healing powers at will.

I have rewatched the scenes about the DI and nothing was ever mentioned about infertility problems. I think that the infetility problems are relatively new. There is no evidence that they had recruited another scientist to deal with the infertility problems and I doubt that they would have waited for years and years to get somebody there.

Kelvin did not get to the island until after 1992, Mikhail hints that he was at the purge and he was on island for 11 years...so 1993. Juliet was there from 2001 on...maybe it was something that slowly started happening in the 8 years between the purge and Juliet's arrival.

It could be possible that the gas is what caused the air to become tainted and harmful for pregnancies on the island.

Great question! Although it isn't infertility per se, it is a problem with the female reproductive system. I don't recall any discussion pre-purge regarding this.

However, my theory is that Ben got Annie preganant and she died, and this was pre-purge. Ben then found out that the DI knew about this situation, but didn't tell anyone. That is what drove Ben to side with the Hostiles and commit the purge.

If the infertility is due to the purge gas, then why did Juliet think that Sun's pregnancy would be affected?

Or for that matter, why would Ben be worried about Alex getting pregnant?

My theory is that Dharma somehow caused the infertility with one of their experiments. I have this suspicion that Dharma is not as "good" as we are led to believe. Ben could have actually had decent motives for helping the hostiles with the purge. Maybe Ben thought he was saving mankind from a much larger Dharma experiment.

I don't think it is an accident that the numbers were printed on the "medicine" that Des was taking in the hatch.

I also believe that Dharma's work would somehow benefit Widmore Industries (pharmaceuticals), which is why he is after Ben.

My question, which is related to this one, is "Where did Karl come from?" - He has no parents. If infertility has always been a problem, I guess he didn't come from Dharma.

Could he be from another group of survivors? That might explain why Ben and the others already had the fake costumes and fake city???

I'm still waiting for a logical, medical explanation of the following:

You get pregnant on the island, you stay on the island, you die and the baby is never born.

You get pregnant on the island, you leave the island to give birth, you and the baby live.

You get pregnant off the island, you give birth on the island, you and the baby live.

I INFER that if you conceive and/or give birth on Alcatraz rather than Craphole, you die anyway--otherwise, Alcatraz would be full of honeymoon cottages and/or birthing suites.

I also INFER that if you get pregnant on the island, stay on the island and have an abortion, you die anyway--otherwise, why wouldn't every pregnant woman get an abortion? It's not as if there were ever going to be a live baby.

What sort of hormonal disruption could cause all these phenomena?

Don't the women die about the same time during pregnancy that Ben's mother delivered him and died? I always assumed there was some sort of mental connection with Ben and the island and the fertility issues because of that.