UMass Collegiette Kayla Setters talked last November about the muck and mire of… THE PILL. Dun dun duuuuuuuuunn. If your ovaries make you want to cry, you are about to hear some very, very good news.
Women! For too long the onus has been on you to keep babies out of the womb. For too long have you prioritized your day along (very stylish, calendar-style) pill pouches. For too long have you sacrificed your hormonal consistency for sperm! For emotional and financial freedom! X’s and Y’s deserve baby liberation.
Let me step back. Nobody likes condoms. They destroy the vibe, they look utterly ridiculous (in fact, quite like an udder), and they don’t feel as good for anybody. Granted, STD protection is critical. But assuming you are in a committed relationship (or otherwise very honest one-night-stand), it’s much preferred to go au naturel. But now we step into the land of non-latex (has anybody actually used those lambskin condoms since the Romans?), the pill, IUD, shots, NUVA Ring, dental dam (oh God, no), diaphragms, caps, sponges, the morning-after pill… all of these medications are ridiculous! Men have a vasectomy. This is an extreme alternative with successful reversal rates of 30-50 percent, odds that I would never gamble on. Something seems out of balance.
There is an alternative: Male birth control, and it’s non-hormonal, reversible, and reliable.
This is the dream. Meet Vasalgel, the RISUG India copycat company who is pushing it through trial stages for FDA approval.
After working with the procedure on rabbits, they have had full sterilization and reversal, and the FDA is now moving onto baboon testing. (Don’t worry, they are being kept in large outdoors facilities, not tiny cages! This is the business of making love, remember?)
The procedure requires a small injection of a polymer into the vas deferens which destroys sperm upon ejaculation. To reverse, the procedure is repeated with a solution to dissolve the polymer and flush it out. Each are short, outpatient procedures completed in under fifteen minutes. And it’s wicked cheap, too. RISUG has experienced 15 years of human success in India. I set out to find out if this alternative would gain traction in America, starting with our campus community.
Standing outside of the Du Bois library I got the chance to screen a broad selection of our campus youth and the occasional faculty coming in and out of the building on their general opinions of a male birth control. The sample included women, although fewer women took the opportunity to stop and engage about the subject. 100% of women who did stop to chat about male birth control were in favor of male birth control. No great surprise there. How about the men?
About 60% percent of men would consider male birth control, and about half of those would take advantage of this opportunity. Middle aged men were the most opposed to the idea. Several of whom laughed their way out of Du Bois after being posed the question, “What do you think about male birth control?” If I was to ask them the same question but eliminated the word “male,” there would be no laughter, and I would be no more than a goof asking a taboo question at a library. For these men, the mere idea of a male birth control was a joke. This is of course a symptom of our culture; men thrust and come, women take care of the rest. RISUG and Vasalgel are setting out to provide an option to help uproot that expectation in a wonderfully pragmatic way.
Men, get on board. Women, spread the word.
And may we all leave college (voluntarily) baby-free.