Me [21 M] with my girlfriend [18 F] 2.5 years, 3 months pregnant and wants to keep it.

Well why don't more women fight for the guys contraception that's not getting much funding?

Not true: The Parsemus Foundation, which is the nonprofit organization that's supporting Vasalgel's clinical trials and trying to bring it to market as a low-cost passive contraceptive for men, was created and is still run by Elaine Lissner, who's campaigned for better male BC alternatives for decades. Moreover, Kirsten Thompson is arguably the most high-profile researcher on male BC alternatives in the United States and is also the co-founder of [MaleContraceptives.org](MaleContraceptives.org).

And honestly, the funding issue is beside the point anyway: I think you'll find that the issue is not that women are running around yelling, "We have the POWER of PREGNANCY!" like some kind of demented Power Ranger. Women have historically been saddled with most of the responsibility and expense of contraception simply because: a). it's easier to control their fertility than men's, and: b). they had (and have) incentives to prevent dangerous back-to-back pregnancies and historically dangerous and oft-illegal abortions. You can fool their bodies into thinking they're already pregnant (hormonal birth control via pills, injections, or IUDs), block the passage of sperm to the ovaries (diaphragms/spermicides), or prevent the uterine conditions necessary for a fertilized egg to implant (copper IUD). Abortion is of course another option, but it does tend to excite state legislatures these days.

By contrast:

  • Men have a never-ending supply of viable sperm from the testes, and there's no physiological reason for their bodies to shut down capacity.
  • Hormonal birth control for men effectively castrates them, which is of course pointless.
  • You can block the passage of sperm for men with specialized devices, but those are called condoms; most guys hate them for understandable reasons and will not use them if another option is available.

This dumps us at the pull-out method (unreliable), the "rhythm" method (also unreliable unless you really know what you're doing), or just letting women handle it. The latter option has been -- by far -- the most popular since the sexual revolution, although it does mean that we see such idiotic and grossly unfair situations as the OP's.

So I don't think there's much room to argue that a useful, passive form of male BC hasn't happened just because women aren't sufficiently behind it. If anything, women have more incentive than men to support it, because it's largely their responsibility anyway and because most birth control options for women frankly suck. Hormonal BC has an array of really unpleasant side effects, fiddling with diaphragms is annoying, and male-dominated legislative bodies are busy building moats with sharks around abortion clinics these days.

The real issue, as so many researchers and pharmaceutical executives have commented, is developing a male BC alternative that men will be willing to use. That's probably the single biggest reason that pharmaceutical companies in the West have been so reluctant to bring alternatives to market. Even Vasalgel might wind up being a long shot because it had difficulty attracting a sufficient number of test subjects in India. Most men did not particularly like the idea of having their scrotums cut into in order to be rendered temporarily sterile. Vasalgel and options like it might actually be the least physically invasive form of birth control outside of condoms/pulling out, but I'm not sure I'd want to be the marketer in charge of convincing guys that a brief outpatient surgical procedure is preferable to just letting their wives/girlfriends deal with the issue.

Not to forget if a guy took off a condom during sex and continued it would be considered rape... This is the same thing.

As a passing note, this is exactly what Julian Assange did to two Swedish women, and most of Reddit tripped all over itself explaining that taking a condom off during sex without your partner's knowledge or consent totally wasn't rape because something something reasons.

/r/relationships Thread Parent