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In present day 2015, the available options for contraception aren’t great, and the burden still rests largely on women to mitigate the damages of our wanton impulses. Aside from the copper IUD, all the birth control devices and pharmaceuticals available to women alter our hormones with various weird side effects. When it comes to birth control for men, aside from condoms and pulling out (neither of which are very reliable in practice), a vasectomy has been the only other option for preventing unwanted pregnancies. Though there’s about a coin-flip chance of it being reversible, those odds aren’t enough to make it something guys under 40 typically consider. A few other male contraceptives are being explored, but there are no approved male contraceptive drugs in the United States.
But what if there was a simple way a man to fire blanks until he and his partner were ready to have a kid—without the snip snap?
The process takes about 15 minutes. A doctor injects a tiny dot of a synthetic gel into the sperm-carrying tube just outside of each testicle. Once injected, the gel sets in the tube and acts like a filter, allowing fluid to pass through but not sperm. “Like water might percolate through Jello,” said Elaine Lissner, director of the Parsemus Foundation.
This isn’t like a Depo-Provera shot you have to get once every few months either—once injected, the sperm-filtering gel would remain in place for 10 years. If the recipient decides he wants to take a shot at having kids at any point in between, all it takes is another injection of sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda) to dissolve the liquid, and the sperm factory becomes operational again.
It may sound too good to be true, but clinical and animal trials in India have shown that the method works with near-perfect results and no serious side effects. And unlike the birth control pill and condoms, which have a real-life efficacy rate far lower than the ‘perfect use’ scenarios advertised on the packages, the birth control injection, like an IUD, comes with virtually no room for human error.
So why isn't this in widespread use? Well, one reason might be that commercially, there is more money to be made selling contraceptive pills than a 10-yearly injection, and secondly, I guess "needles in close proximity to testicles" is not something that many men like the sound of...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by K_benzoate on Monday April 06 2015, @08:10AM
I'm celibate but if I had sex I wouldn't trust the woman because of the legal system in the US favoring them. There's no financial incentive for the man to trick a woman into pregnancy, and plenty of reasons for him to take every precaution against it. The more options for preventing pregnancy the better, for men and women.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 06 2015, @01:39PM
There may be no financial incentives, but there are definitely enough non-financial incentives that lots of men don't take the precautions they should. Some of them, in rough order of importance:
1. Getting laid without a condom feels great.
2. In some subcultures, if you get a girl pregnant she pretty much has to marry you. If you want somebody to be your wife but she's a bit more reluctant, getting her pregnant can change her mind.
3. There is a very good chance that the man in question can avoid the financial consequences. Some of the many methods:
a. If the woman is promiscuous enough, then there's a good chance she won't know who the father is. If the father successfully avoids DNA testing, then he's scot-free.
b. It's not uncommon for men in this situation to show 0 income, but be getting paid under the table in cash as a way of avoiding child support responsibility.
c. If either the mother or father moves to a different state, collecting the awarded child support becomes significantly harder.
In addition, as much as it sucks to be sending a significant chunk of cash every month to someone else, I'm not convinced that's worse than spending a majority of your waking life taking care of a child. And odds are very good she's taking on some of the expenses of the child as well. I'll put it this way: I've known enough single mothers to know that their life is rarely made easier by the child, even if that child's father is paying support like he's supposed to (and often he isn't).
All that boiling down to: If you think that lots of women are intentionally trying to trick men into getting them pregnant, think again. It happens, but it's nowhere close to the majority. If it were, you'd be seeing women clamoring for abortion to be illegal, and they're not.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday April 06 2015, @03:48PM
We do see women clamoring for abortion to be illegal. They are called Republicans.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @09:56PM
Yeah but they're just parroting the party lines and don't actually believe, want, or follow any of the crap they say (correction, Republicans want it for everyone except themselves). How many vehemently anti-gay Republicans have been caught engaging in gay sex so far?