Family planning involves men … but are we committed?
There’s a joke about the difference between being involved and being committed. A chicken is involved in a ham and eggs breakfast. The pig is committed.
A point we’ve made here on The Good Men Project about birth control is that it is not a women’s issue: it’s a human issue. Although this may not remain true forever, it still takes some kind of commitment, made by at least two people, even if they never meet. Stephen Colbert has humorously noted that the best way to avoid getting pregnant is to be a man, while the House votes to defund Planned Parenthood and a rich donor to the Santorum campaign is quoted as saying that women should use an aspirin tablet for their birth control.
Biology is not egalitarian. The Pill (and not the aspirin pill) jerked the scales closer to level, but females are still the only ones who get pregnant. In what ways do men contribute to family planning? Are the methods you are using, or have used, bearable, fair, or sane, for either party? Do you feel left out of the conversation altogether, assuming that women should manage this responsibility alone? Has birth control made your life better? What could men be doing to advance the aims of family planning in society, even if we can’t get pregnant, or don’t have procreative sex?
Answers to these and related questions are sought for an upcoming section in The Good Men Project Magazine, “Men and Contraception.” Submissions should be made through Submishmash. Deadline is Sunday, April 1. Questions may be emailed directly to Justin Cascio, Senior Editor, at [email protected]. Please include “Men and Contraception” in your Submishmash title or email subject line.
—Photo Alaskan Dude/Flickr
“Biology is not egalitarian”
That is only if you think contraecption and reproduction is only about pregancy. That’s a pretty pubertarian sets of blinders. Not everything in the universe is always about her precious body.
Human reporduction takes 18 years and that part is egalitarian. If the father is absent, for whatever reason, it tends to go a lot less well. The prisons are full of evidence supporting that.
How do men contribute to family planning? Well men got the technology together and funded it and the people behind PP and International pp are male, men also pay more into the welfare state than they take out and the reverse is true for women, so men do contribute to FP, even single and gay men do even if they aren’t aware of it. I think that women remember to take the pill out of fear, I think that men will take the pill just as well if they are afraid of the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy too. Men… Read more »