A lot of children are born without planning. Neither of my kids were specifically planned. In your opinion what would happen to American birthrates if an inexpensive, safe and reliable male contraceptive (say a once month pill) was developed.
Would overall US birth rates change a lot, a little, or not at all?
I dont think many women would trust their men to take them when down deep, its their body that gets fertilized. Heck adult women sometimes forget to take their pill.
That’s a totally different issue. If a woman doesn’t want to buy “don’t worry baby, I’m on the pill” that’s their prerogative, and perhaps a rational one, but if a guy is on the pill he’s on the pill. The only thing your point shows is that we probably won’t see a corresponding spike down in women using personal contraceptives.
That said, I don’t know if we’d see a radical difference in births. I think the demographics of people likely to use some form of reliable male BC roughly mirror the demographics currently using female BC. We’d see birth rates go down slightly among those demographics, just due to stacking the odds against conception even more, but I doubt you’ll see unplanned pregnancies shrivel up.
I think there could well be a significant effect. For instance, isn’t it something of a cliche that, as one professor of mine succinctly and repeatedly put it, “men leave”? If some men started avoiding all the problems and drama and expense associated with unplanned pregnancy, but still got all the sex they wanted, it would become wildly popular, don’t you think? (Note that this is possible already, by combining condoms with coitus interruptus, but still, you see my point.)
Additionally, have we all heard of the phenomenon of “oopsing”? It doesn’t matter if she “forgets” her contraceptive, if he remembers his!
Search “gandarusa.” It’s quite exciting.
The bid difference would be if there could be a simple implant (reversible when a couple wants to have kids). It would be a once every X years thing and I think that a lot of unplanned pregnancies would go down.
Aren’t vasectomies safe and reversible? They haven’t dropped fertility rates much. Either way there are over a dozen forms of birth control available and I don’t think one more would really make a difference. The big issue is whether you plan to use them or not.
For one thing, such an ideal BC method would allow for women to stop taking what is, in many cases, not at all a “safe and effective” method, in the sense that chemical BC often destroys your sex drive, packs on the pounds, and has other significant side effects.
One of my pet peeves is the persistent belief among men that being on the pill is like taking a smartie each day, and the only issue is remembering it.
Also, STD rates would probably go up.
There’s a medication that’s used for treating benign enlarged prostate that basically stops your semen from ejaculating when you orgasm. My doctor told me that it would be an almost foolproof male contraceptive.
Yes to safety, but reversing a vasectomy is very iffy. Also, read what I wrote earlier about gandarusa. Some pregnancies are only unplanned by one of the partners.
Some STDs lead to infertility, which would mean fewer pregnancies.
I took tamsulosin when I was waiting for kidney stones to pass last year, which softens the tubes, and a common side effect is that it softens a particular sphincter, and you can ejaculate into your bladder. My understanding was that it doesn’t necessarily do this for everyone, though.
I don’t think it would change that much. It’s not actually that hard to prevent pregnancies.
Thats my view. What people really need is motive and the ability to understand how pregnancy works, and how birth control works. Another form of birth control wouldn’t make much of a difference. There are already forms that are 95%+ effective to pick from, one more shouldn’t change things much.
But wouldn’t this one prevent “oopsing”, along with may of the pregnancies that result from people being too drunk/high/ignorant to use condoms and such correctly?
I dunno. Most forms of BC do have pretty significant downsides. There’s a thread right now full of men who find sex with a condom really substandard. I’d rather be celibate, myself, than ever go on chemical BC again. Some women can’t tolerate IUDs. BC that was really, honestly, side-effect free would be a significant change.
The problem is that every single current birth control method has significant drawbacks, either interfering with sexual pleasure (condoms and withdrawal), requiring inconvenient timing (rhythm method and diaphragms), or having negative physical or medical effects (hormonals and implants).
Yes, for me it seems more like picking the least bad option. Like you, I don’t like chemical BC. Condoms are pretty much the only method I’ll use. Dating a guy with a vasectomy would be ideal. And if there were a quick and painless way to surgically sterilize myself, I’d go with that.
We might among married couples, but it sounds like everyone is assuming this hypothetical male birth control is very safe, and close to 100% effective-- in other words, better than anything available to women.
With education, you could get almost 100% effectiveness with current methods. It would require things like teaching teens how to use condoms, and more importantly, how NOT to use them (don’t carry them in wallets for months, don’t try to reuse them, etc., etc.) It would require thinks like explaining to people how to track fertility, and that while they should never have unprotected sex, ever, they should double up on methods during the four days or so that a woman is the most likely to conceive.
That probably would have been true before the morning after pill was developed, but there are degrees of “unplannedness,” so to speak. People in the Quiverfull movement don’t plan any of their children, but they want every one of them (supposedly). Some married couples elect not to use birth control for a certain number of year of marriage, say, from their second anniversary to their 10th, at which point their both get sterilized. However many children they have in the interim is what they were “destined” to have-- I don’t hold with that thinking, but I know people like that. And while some people consider an unplanned pregnancy the worst news in the world, other people think it’s great, so they don’t see anything wrong with being loosey-goosey with the birth control.
Because it’s been in the news, and a few episodes of TV shows, I think a lot of people think that women trying to trap a man be getting pregnant against his wishes is a bigger problem than it is. I think it’s pretty rare. Male BC might prevent those few instances, but they are a really tiny number of unplanned pregnancies.
I’m often baffled by the numbers of unplanned pregnancies, but then I remember a couple of things. For one, I would see it as the end of the world, and others are so fatalistic about it. That makes no sense to me, but I realize it is reality. For another, I don’t drink, or get high, and a great many conceptions occur under the influence. If a man is temporarily sterile ahead of time, thanks to gandarusa or any other male contraceptive, might that category of unplanned pregnancies be greatly reduced?
I think that’s ignoring the human element. Perfectly well educated teens (and adults) would still have sex without a condom because they don’t have one, and they really, really want to have sex right that minute. Sometimes, too, people are willing to accept various levels of risk simply because they dislike the side-effects or costs of what is available. There’s nothing about education that would change that.
I do think that side-effect free, long-term male BC would really change the exact timing and circumstances of pregnancies more than it would change birthrates. There are a lot of people that might have had a planned pregnancy or two (or three or four!) had it not been for the unplanned pregnancy or two (or three or four!) that occurred first. This isn’t just within a couple, either: let’s say two single parents, both with a kid from an unplanned pregnancy in a previous relationship. The number of kids they will have with each other will likely be less because they already have two, and resources are finite. They might have none where otherwise they’d have had 1, or they might have 2 where otherwise they’d have had 4, but the effect is the same.