Should Men Care That Male Birth Control Options Are Languishing?

Yes Please...

My anecdotal tale is from a college psych course debate on this topic. The men in the class overwhelmingly supported this option as a form of taking control of their reproductive lives. Sadly, the women, including the professor, in the class overwhelmingly presented the expected ridicule and disdain for men in their distrust on the topic.

We are asking for it and we want it. Unfortunately, until women are willing to address their own sexism and accept that men want to be engendered with self determination in their role in reproduction there will be a gulf in acceptance. For example, our campus has an office for female reproductive health, this needs to be changed to the men and women's office for reproductive health. I think a large barrier is the fragile female ego and sense of that their control is threatened in the realm of reproduction.

Male contraception

After I have a couple of kids I will immediatly get myself steralized (get them to take a huge chunk out so that there is no chance of it accidently fixing its self latter) but I do want a couple of the little guys first. But before that I would like to have a house for my family and be "setup" properly in my life to have a child. Give me one more year and I'll be there in my life, if I have a child now..... It would be much more difficult for me to get to that goal.

As the husband of a roman catholic it is difficult for me to get her to use birth control and she gets frusterated that I can't "just pull out."

She is very firm about not having children until she's 25 but when she wakes me up in the night she doesn't care about anything else.

In conclusion:

If I had a pill or anything else that I could take that would allow me to take control of our birth control I would. She wouldn't be breaking the rules of her religion and it would be much easier for both of us. I think the market for this could be very large. Every couple that is using anything other than a condom should be interested in it.

Note to masses:

All of the males/girls using needles on condoms would find a way to switch out the pills. That I have no doubt about. But this would give LONG TERM COUPLES the freedom to decide together when they want to have children, it would take a lot of the "accidently pregneant" burden away from the women.

Think about it, the 1-6% failure chance for the female pill combined with what we can assume would be the same failure rate for males....

What kind of math would that be in that? .1-.6% chance? .01-.06%?

Don't expect a supply without a Visible Demand, P.2

However, unless American men start demanding contraceptive implants LOUDLY, they may never get them. Why? Profit, again. See below.

(I would provide the link, but somehow it keeps being blocked, so you need to search on "Are You Using Anything?" by Cara Gardner, The Inlander. It's about the benefits of implants and why they don't get a lot of publicity because, unlike pills, they can't be sold over and over again. It's two pages long. Granted, it's from 2004.)

Not to mention that more options for men won't help much if the anti-female contraception movement keeps going forward.

Lastly: I like to imagine a subway billboard like this:

"Don't believe in abortion?

"Don't want her to get pregnant either?

"Men.....Get RISUG. Take control of your OWN life."

And parents (single or not) could say to their sons:

"You use (male contraceptive X) to protect yourself and your future in

case she makes a mistake. That's why I'm taking you to the doctor for

that. However, a gentleman ALWAYS uses condoms to protect his partner -

preferably until he's married. There are plenty of very bad diseases

besides AIDS, you know. Some are permanent, and some can be caught

easily by boys."

Of course, given how strong the temptation would be to refuse to use

condoms, it might be better to wait until the boy is actually used to

buying and using them, macho-wise. That is, until he's 20 or so.

Don't expect a supply without a Visible Demand, P.3

This is part 3 - in the hopes part 2 shows up first.

Better methods of male BC will:

1. Help prevent unwanted fatherhood.

2. Help prevent unwanted abortions.

3. Give men more bargaining power with women who want babies.

4. Alert men to paternity fraud much sooner.

5. Help men who use BC implants to think twice before having them removed. (Obviously, pills are too easy to forget to use, like condoms.)

With all those benefits, why are men just sitting around and waiting?

However, I also predict the main users will be these relatively small groups:

1. Married men whose wives beg them to use the new methods as backups. (I'd guess that many men who are sick of using condoms for years feel that one male privilege of marriage should be not having to use male contraception.)

2. Men who are just plain paranoid about unwanted fatherhood but who won't get vasectomies. (A very small group - many men get vasectomies, including single men.)

3. Celebrities and other rich men, who are undeniably surrounded by golddiggers.

Granted, there are problems. One is that doctors have long claimed that "men don't want their genitals messed with," even when the method is nonhormonal. So men will have to convince doctors otherwise, true or not.

The other (this is a "problem" only in the minds of a few people) is that if the new methods catch on, "Choice for Men" aka "Roe vs. Wade for Men" will be doomed, though I suspect it always was doomed, given that most men didn't really seem to sympathize with it and male comedians always made fun of it. (Look it up.)

And, of course, the problem of teaching young women, over and over, never to trust any single man who tries to talk them out of using condoms.

Finally, about the "shrill commentary," (yes, men were mentioned as well as women) it's true that women can be pretty harsh and cynical on the general subject. ("I wouldn't trust him!") However, again, one complaint remains quite valid - why do many men complain publicly about their lack of post-conception options but never about their lack of pre-conception options? Whatever happened to "prevention is better than cure"?

Oh, and thank you, Marty of CA!

Male contraception

I just want to say thank you for your thorough investigation of this, your measured response, and crystalline yet intelligent writing style.

don't expect a supply without a Visible Demand, P.1

Name an activist man who, regarding the demand for male birth control, has been on TV at least as much as those men who demand the right not to support their unwanted children. Pretty hard, isn't it? This seems to indicate the demand isn't that big, which would explain why the pharmaceutical researchers might be dragging their heels. Profit is supreme, you know. If Margaret Sanger and her followers were willing to go to jail to make condoms and diaphragms available to women, why don't we at least have lots of men on TV and the radio loudly protesting and FUNDRAISING for better male BC? (With all the proper safety tests, of course.)

Yes, AIDS means that single men will always be under pressure to use condoms. Yes, long-term/married couples tend to stop using condoms because both men and women dislike them. However, this doesn't have to be an issue of men trusting women (or vice versa) - just a matter of understanding that:

1) all methods can fail (the female pill has a real-life 6% failure rate, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute) so it's just plain dumb not to use two methods each and every time, and

2) if YOU don't want a pregnancy, it's YOUR job to control your own fertility. If BOTH sides use BC, where's the problem?

BTW, even if she's using an IUD, there's still the risk of ectopic pregnancies, which can be fatal to her, so don't try to argue that there's no need for a backup contraceptive in that case.

If and when we get better methods for men, men everywhere could actually say to women "you can have a baby only when you give me what I want." Or, at least, they'd have 99% peace of mind while they were still using condoms in the relationship, since they'd secretly know that a pinhole wouldn't make much difference.

promiscuous behavior?

Considering that men have a tendency toward risky behavior, I fear a male pill would make men less likely to protect themselves in terms of STD's. Where the commitment implied by a pregnancy quickly induces men to use a condom (which also would protect them from many STD's) the male pill would not. The result could be an uptick in many STD's but a decline in unwanted pregnancies. This, though, would be a non-issue for married folks and would likely help ease the family planning burden as suggested in your article. Very interesting!