Navaho Gunleg

You might have noticed that I don’t want to have kids (the reasons as to why are beyond the scope of this little blurb though — but I’m sure you’ll believe me when I say that, to sum it all up, it’s really best for the kid). To accomplish this my girlfriend uses some method of birth-control involving the usual suspects: hormones and chemicals. Hormones and chemicals that mess with the ‘natural’ balance.

If you are a couple worried about the same thing, chances are you have occasionally discussed ‘why should the woman take precautions, and not the man?’.

Apparently, the pharmaceutical industry saw this coming and has started spending their research-budgets on it years ago.

Recently, me and the girl had the same talk, sparked by some new developments on the male birth-control scene I read about some time last month (looking around for references I noticed some recent hype about it) — within a couple of years the male birth control pill may actually be a reality.

So we were talking about the options, when it suddenly hit me why male birth-control can never be as effective as the female. I haven’t gotten around to actually share this and because I feel I make a very solid point that both male and female would acknowledge — here goes…

First of all, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t want to take a responsible part in accomplishing the goal of not having kids — even though I shiver at the thought of things like surgical sterilisation. That’s why I had always thought the male birth-control pill to be a good idea (apart from possible long-term problems that might arise from teenagers using it to mess around, in contrast to using a condom which would beneficially prevent against venereal diseases).

Getting the male sterile (chemically, surgically or whatever way), just like the decision not to have sex, will not ever guarantee anything…

In the worst case scenario you’ve had your vas deferens cut in two and tied knots in, thus making it impossible for the sperm to leave your testes. OK I know it’s hard (pun unintended), but try to imagine that. That doesn’t prevent any other man’s sperm leaving their testes, now does it? [It's like, installing a firewall on machine A to prevent attacks on machine B which obviously doesn't prevent it getting probed by a third, unknown machine.]

I don’t want kids and I surely wouldn’t want to raise some frigging rapists kid — or any other guys kid for that matter.

Imagine if you have gone through having a vasectomy — there you stand, a man, psychologically possibly your manhood affected because of the surgical procedure — and you would still end up paying for an abortion or (even worse, if you have objections to abortion) waste your valuable time raising a kid you didn’t want to have in the first place, and its looks are probably a constant reminder of the rapist and that it’s not even yours.

Life can be a bitch at times, but that would really hurt (and it will most probably seriously mess up the kid, too).

In conclusion, after having thought about it while writing this post, at the moment I’m likened to think that these pills are not targetted at couples. They’re not for the people that seriously want to prevent (or postpone) having kids — not really if you think about it. It seems more targetted at the male that ’screws around’ and I bet that’s a goldmine.

Birth-control