Deanna Ogle examines Georgia Democrats’ attempt to ban vasectomies.
Over the last several months women’s reproductive health rights and have been attacked, but women are not allowing these rights to be infringed upon without a fight. Last week they walked out in protest of a congressional hearing about contraception completely comprised of men, voiced so much disapproval when Komen pulled their Planned Parenthood funding that the decision was reversed almost overnight, and the bill in Virginia requiring women to be forcefully probed before an abortion was slowed to a halt when women came out against the unnecessary and deplorable legislation.
But when it comes to the birth control conversation, Robert Walker of the Huffington Post asks, where are the men?
The conversation surrounding reproductive health have only been made worse by sound bites from people who still hold a 1950’s women-are -responsible-for-birth-control attitude and lop-sided logic. For example, when the Catholic church said that Viagra, which is currently covered for men on staff, solves a medical problem and that contraception does not, Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” responded with: “So the Catholic Church says that a boner is a need, but not getting pregnant is … more of a want.”
If men’s reproductive rights were being threatened as equally as women’s, would men be more likely to be involved?
Robert Walker thinks so. “If legislatures were requiring colorectal exams for no good medical reason, banning Viagra, outlawing condoms and vasectomies, and otherwise messing with the private parts and reproductive health of men, you better believe that men would be doing more than waiting for a Gallup pollster to ring them up,” he says.
A group of Georgia Democrats are doing just that in order to bring attention to the unfair biases and wake up the masculine base that has been absent from the fight thus far. They proposed HB 954 which would bar men from being able to get vasectomies. According to the proponents, this bill is specifically designed to show the faulty logic in the legislators’ anti-contraception approach and to encourage men to take a more active stance in the conversation.
Joseph Tash of The University of Kansas and his team of reproductive biologists are working on another way for men to take charge of the birth control issue. Tash and his team have created a birth control pill for men. The pill contains a chemical compound called H2-gamendazole that prevents sperm from developing. Tash says that men will be able to take the pill, and when they go off of it will be able to regain full fertility within a matter of weeks.
Fifty years after the advent of the contraceptive pill for woman, men will soon be able shift the responsibility of birth control that has largely been left to women back into their own hands.
“Unless [women] want to keep fighting — and losing — these battles forever, it’s time to enlist a few good men in their cause,” concludes Walker.
Have you been speaking up and we just have been missing your voice? Do you think that you as men can’t help win the fight so you have left their thoughts off the table? If approved by the FDA, would you take Tash’s gamendolze pill?
Photo credit: Flickr/Gnarls Monkey