Males are more likely to infect women than women are to infect men for most things.
Gotcha. I assumed we were talking about male only condoms, which is why I got confused, because it would be the same situation either way. I don’t think my processing capabilities are up to speed today.
Again with the pronouns. “We” aren’t making decisions. One specific company’s ethics board is.
We as a society are alot different than when the pill was developed. We are at a place where neither aspirin or tylenol could get developed today. You can’t go a day without seeing a commercial on tv asking you to join a class action lawsuit against some company. It would be great if we still lived in a society that believed in letting adults make decisions about their own health, but we don’t. None of that has anything to do with male and female. Tylenol overdoses send 56,000 americans a year to the hospital each year but no one is calling for that to be banned. That is because tens of millions of people use it safely. The pill is not being recalled because tens of millions use it safely. Both tylenol and the pill were developed during a time where safety standards were much lower and you could not get 10s of millions from suing drug companies over rare side effects. To say that women are devalued or men infantilized ignores the context of what is going on.
Yes, pronouns - “we” is society at large. “We” in different context includes men who aren’t interested in taking responsibility for contraception (see Drewders post), our litigous society that thinks it needs to sue for everything - even when the side effects are disclosed and the risks are on you (except we can’t sue gun manufacturers - that would be wrong), the corporations who fold on this, the medical professional who write off women’s health concerns as whining, but take men’s seriously. (IUDs can puncture the uterus - some new IUDs have been put on the market fairly recently - Skyla hit the market in 2013 - the new ones still can puncture the uterus.) Plus our weird double standards (in some regions of the country, Catholic hospitals are all that are reachable - Catholic hospitals will not treat an epoctic pregnancy - even though it risks the mother’s life and the fetus has zero chance - but somehow “acne” is worth halting this study over.
Yes, pronouns - its rage against the world with this one, because it so nicely sums up the bifurcation of health care by gender in this country.
I don’t think anyone in this thread has noted something else from Sunny Daze’s link, which is that there was one participant in the study who lost his fertility entirely and had not regained it four (!) years after the study ended.
I think there are a lot of women, me included, who would not use a birth control method with something like a 1 in 320 chance that we’d be permanently sterile.
A man’s sperm count can change over time - it may or may not be a case of causation. The patient in question could have had an unusually high for him sperm count when accepted into the program.
And statistics doesn’t work that way - with such a small sample of incidents, we don’t know if its one in 320 or one in 300,000. Did we get the 1 in a million chance at number 320? Don’t know - not a big enough sample.
And a lot of women use IUDs - for about 1 in 2000 women, an IUD will perforate the uterus, risking infertility.
Modern IUDs are much, MUCH safer than the old ones. The Dalkon Shield put IUDs back 40 years in the popularity department, in addition to maiming and/or killing not a small number of women. BTW, the Dalkon Shield is one reason why we have such tight regulations at the FDA.
And it’s also possible that the man’s sperm count declined for reasons unrelated to the drug. This is another reason why we need large numbers of people in drug trials.
While we’re on the subject of representative populations, can we put lefties in the trials too, please?
I’m a bit tired of all the shit side-effects because nobody bothered to test the drugs on us.
Yes, much better than the nightmare of the Dalkon Shield but there remain issues with PID (which isn’t actually a problem with the device - shoving a foreign object into the uterus increases the chance of infection - not surprisingly) and perforation of the uterus. 12% of women who get PID end up infertile - one in seven women will get PID, and PID risk increases threefold if you use an IUD.
Infertility as a result of birth control isn’t a new risk - its another one women have been weighing in their decision making process for years.
The IUD is a good example of “not all birth control is good for all people.” For the people the IUD works for - its wonderful. For those it doesn’t, its hellish. Which is why maximizing choices in birth control is good.
The IUD was hellish for me. No perforated uterus but terrible pain for a year (they swore it couldn’t be the IUD, did painful vaginal ultrasound to make sure it was inserted properly, etc) and I was still having bleeding… turns out the bleeding was not ‘‘period’’ bleeding, it was cervical bleeding. The only time I’ve ever had an infection. God, it was awful.
I have heard numerous horror stories about Essure, and unlike an IUD, it’s difficult to remove. If you want permanent birth control, good grief, just get a tubal ligation. You’re protected from the day you get your tubes tied, and don’t have to go back for a radiographic procedure several months later to make sure the tubes have closed (and have to use some form of BC in the meantime, just like if a man had a vasectomy).
I have also heard not-good things about Nuvaring, a hormonal ring designed to be worn in the vagina for 3 weeks and off for 1 week. Many women have described having terrible mood swings while on it.
[sarcasm] But tubes tied…you might change your mind [/sarcasm]
(For those that don’t know, it can be difficult to get a doctor to agree to tie your tubes unless you’ve had several children. And then there is the Catholic hospital problem - you have to find a doctor who will do it with OR privileges somewhere other than a Catholic hospital. Which if you live in a region that has few hospitals, and most of them are Catholic, you are screwed.)
The ring worked perfectly for me for 6 months and then stopped working (to control my pain.) the story of birth control.
And yes, it’s hard enough to get a tubal much less a hysterectomy if you haven’t had children.
Essure isn’t intended to be removed, their website even calls it *permanent *birth control. Also, what **Dangerosa **said.
Yes, of course you’re absolutely right about my abuse of statistics terms – I was a bit in a hurry, which is of course not a good excuse. There were 8 participants who had not met the criteria of return to fertility after a year, which is of course still a small sample size, but suggestive. Now, 5 of these had recovered fertility by 74 weeks, and 2 of them stopped answering their questions, so.
I’d forgotten about that… yeeeeah, that’s right, I decided against the IUD, although my sister loves hers.
If you want permanent birth control, good grief, get a vasectomy! 
(Less invasive and fewer complications than a tubal, from what I understand.)
Though you may have to incentivize your partner 
And it obviously isn’t a good choice for women who are just in the hooking up stage of requiring birth control 
(And I was pretty sure you knew better on the statistics. I typed that with ‘wait, this is raspberry hunter - someone who has shown literacy on this sort of thing in the past’)
It requires removal of the Fallopian tubes, or even a hysterectomy, to get it out.
Yes, because IT WAS INTENDED TO BE PERMANENT.
Unfortunately, far too many women are finding out that removing this thing is more complicated than its insertion. They either weren’t told, or didn’t pay attention before they got it.
Then unfortunately far too many women should learn to read, because it’s very clear that it is not intended to be removed. Of course removing it is difficult, because the manufacturer didn’t include removal in their plan. It’s supposed to be a non-surgical method of permanent sterilization. I don’t believe for a second they weren’t told, as hard as it is to get a supposed-to-be-reversible tubal. Of course their doctor told them it was going to stay in forever.