Safe, convenient, reversible contraception allows women and men worldwide to plan their families and ensure that they are ready to nurture and provide for the children they parent. So why are so few male contraceptive methods available?
The LA Times calls HHS proposal a ‘sneak attack on family planning’; HPV vaccine banned from Catholic school in UK; HIV rates among drug users worldwide rises; Wall Street takes welfare it begrudges to women; Why the election matters for reproductive rights; Jesuit priest embraces social support programs to reduce abortion; Remote control male birth control.
Condoms, vasectomies and the withdrawal method are the only birth control options available to men. Why is there a glaring gap in male-controlled methods?
Due to traditional beliefs about male virility, many men worldwide shun vasectomy, reducing the efficacy of this reliable method of contraception.
As long as male reproductive health care is synonymous with just STD screening rather than comprehensive clinical services, it should come as no surprise that men shirk responsibility both in preventing pregnancy and in embracing fatherhood.
Studies are showing dramatic drops in sperm counts and rising rates of reproductive health problems for men throughout industrialized countries. Are environmental contaminants partially to blame?
In the Madhya Pradesh state of India, the administration is offering men guns in exchange for vasectomies. But in choosing to meet targets rather than educating communities, the administration is hardening stereotypes of manliness, placing communities in even more vulnerable positions.
Many men are perfectly competent at swallowing a pill every day on time, and plenty of them have partners who trust them to do it. So where’s the male birth control pill?
If ever there was a perfect time for men to band together against a loss of fatherhood, that time is now — with their demand for access to emergency contraception. Those who feel that they have been hurt by abortion have more reason than anyone else to spread knowledge of Plan B and support its widespread provision to men.
There is no doubt that the coarseness of political life and the politics of personal destruction are tied to the rise of social conservative ideologues, and their fight against a woman’s right to choose since Roe v. Wade. The advent of a “Culture War” was born out of a movement that opposed legalized abortion and pretended that was its only agenda for many years. But as religious belief turned from mission to power, the greatest of corrupting influences, the swagger of social ideologues and their control of the GOP, the White House, Congress, Courts, Governorships, State Legislatures and School Boards has them ready to take the next step, an all out war on contraception.
This past weekend in Chicago, Joe Schieldler’s Pro-Life Action League hosted 250 people at a conference entitled Contraception Is Not The Answer, opening a new strategic front to advance their ever-more narrow agenda, coming from an ever-expanding cast of ideologically motivated organizations. If conservatives think our culture is coarse now, its probably good to remind them that coarseness is coming less from people actually having sex responsibly than it is from the way uptight ideologues and corporate marketeers and others talk about sex, making it seem clinical and shameful on one extreme, or detached and less sacred on the other. Take the average American’s contraception away and its a safe bet life will be more coarse as people’s tension increases.
One of those 250 people attending the two-day conference was RH Reality Check’s Associate Editor, Tyler LePard.
