In an excellent rundown of current male-contraceptive technology in development, Soumya Vemuganti of RHRealityCheck.org says a product I’ve been waiting for for years has been approved by the FDA last year.

Confirming Lack of Sperm Production 

Since it takes just one sperm to fertilize an egg, it is extremely important to confirm a lack of sperm production using any of the aforementioned male contraceptives.   A product approved by the FDA last year will help to measure the effectiveness of male contraceptives which block spermatogenesis.  SpermCheck Vasectomy offers patients an at home method of measuring their sperm levels post-vasectomy.  It is easy to imagine that this product could also be used to measure the efficacy of reversible male contraceptives; in fact, SpermCheck Contraception is in the works. 

Read the quote in context here.

Because non-barrier/non-vasectomy contraception for men is almost always going to be a lot more complicated than the main non-barrier/non-IUD contraceptives for women having a method to confirm one’s infertility seems pretty critical. And, obviously, it’s just as critical to be able to confirm one’s male partner’s infertility as well. I’m guessing that at least initially the test won’t be cheap enough for casual use — the size of a market based on one-time-only post-vasectomy tests can’t be terribly high — on the order of several hundred thousand a year — and they’ve gotta recover their costs somehow. Presumably with the advent of oral/injectable contraceptives or, possibly more exciting, hotpack-based methods (who knew? but they say it can be 100% effective!) the market could grow into the tens of millions of repeat customers. Presumably that would make the product affordable for frequent use.

One of the few things generally applicable things Ronald Reagan said (over, and over, and over… he was already developing Alzheimer’s) during his negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev was “trust but verify.” Which seems like a tailor-made tagline for a fertility testing product.

Soumya Vemuganti of RHRealityCheck.org has a nice post up introducing what I hope will be a series of further posts about contraceptives for men. (Emphasis mine.)

Safe, convenient, reversible contraception allows women and men worldwide to plan their families and ensure that they are ready to nurture and provide for the children they parent. So why are so few male contraceptive methods available?

In America, 62 million women are of childbearing age; worldwide, the number is around 1.5 billion.  In the US, when these women get pregnant, half of their pregnancies will be unplanned and 42% of these end in abortion. Approximately 40% percent of pregnancies worldwide are unintended.  Globally, about half of all abortions are considered unsafe and more than 75% occur in developing countries.  In order to reduce the number of unsafe abortions worldwide, and to equip individuals with tools they need to take control of their reproductive lives, we need to ensure the availability of reversible, effective birth control solutions with minor side effects for both men and women. 

While only two male contraceptive options (vasectomy and condoms) are available, they are both widely used, making it clear that men are willing to accept responsibility for birth control.  In fact, one study assessed the responsiveness of men from four continents and nine countries to the possibility of “male fertility control,” and found that on average more than half of those surveyed were willing to use such a method.  The legal responsibility associated with fathering a child is also motivating men to take control of their reproductive fate.   

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Ideally, a male contraceptive would be effective, reversible, with few side effects. When it is, not only will we have secured a victory for equality of the sexes, we will offer couples worldwide a new method for ensuring that they are able to choose parenthood when they are ready.

Read the quote in context here.

If you’ve read this blog over the years you know this is a very big deal for me. So much of our narrative about gender depends on men’s essential irresponsibility, particularly irresponsibility concerning reproduction. And yet as Vemuganti points out that a) the only methods available for use by men are (relatively) low-reliability condoms and invasive, permanent surgical vasectomy — which tends to limit men’s options, and that b) half of men around the world would be willing to use oral contraceptives if they were available.

In other words we’re using the extreme unwieldiness of existing male contraceptive as a reason why men won’t use… more convenient ones.

(Relevant aside: years ago a roommate’s conservative dad was visiting. At dinner he started ranting about how “they” were making his department install an elevator in the building he worked in to make it wheelchair accessible. The dad said “It’s a total boondoggle! I’ve worked there nearly 20 years and I’ve never seen anyone in a wheelchair!” My roommate said “Dad, you work on the third floor, of course you’ve never seen anybody in a wheelchair up there.” The point being, well, obvious.)

Vemuganti also mentions the point about how increasing legal responsibility for fathering children is a motivator. I’m pretty sure at least some people are still going look at that and say “typical MRA attitude” but that’s actually more of a feature than a bug. If someone’s going to take responsibility in order to avoid responsibility for an unplanned, unwanted child that’s still wanting to take responsibility. And if the goal is to create a market for contraception for men it’s really not relevant that the market be entirely driven by altruism. (We don’t even expect a single motivation in the market for contraceptives for women.)

Finally, it’s important to remember that if a male contraceptive becomes available — one corresponding to the same relative cost, efficiency, reliability, and side-effect burden of hormonal contraception for women — it’s going to tend to strongly affect not only the pressure men’s partners exert but also peer pressure from other men to use them.

Anyway, I’m not sure how regular a feature it’ll be but I’m still looking forward to the series.

f.f. of Feminist Finance says of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proposal to include birth-control funding in one of the bailout packages. She says the media’s treating the proposal as if it arose out of Peloci’s partisan eccentricity but…

There are a lot of crap suggestions on the table right now as far as what this new bailout bill will fund. Subsidized birth control for women who want it is not one of those crap suggestions. If the federal government is going to continue to pretend that it is concerned with stabilizing US households with this bailout bill, rather than just propping up big business, this is a perfect way to show it.

While certainly not a perfect system, clinics serving college students and low-income women used to be able to offer substantially subsidized birth control. When I was in school, my student health center offered birth control for $5 or $10 for a month’s supply, depending on what type you used. Enter the Deficit Reduction Act, which took effect in January 2007. It was intended to keep pharmaceutical companies from abusing Medicaid reimbursements, but it had an unforseen consequence of prohibiting longstanding arrangements between drug companies and clinics that allowed clinics to buy and distribute contraceptives at extremely discounted rates. In the wake of the Deficit Reduction Act, birth control costs for the women who use these clinics has gone up by as much as 1000%.

So it’s not as though this subsidizing birth control access is a zany, untested idea. We know it’s important. We’ve done it in the past. Let’s dial back the flipping out, or at least refocus it in other directions

She said it here.

Yup. Except for being about ZOMG The Sex the proposal’s actually pretty consistent with straight-up Keynesian stimulus theory: it immediately reduces household expenses for the 50-100 million households that currently pay retail for contraception, it’s “shovel ready” in the sense that it involves restarting recently-suspended programs and extending them in an off-the-shelf fashion to additional care centers, and by stabilizing household finance on the one hand and mitigating system-wide healthcare impact of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies** on the other, and doing it all at a point while individuals and institutions alike are still marshaling for as-yet undetermined social and economic fallout.

Compare that to, say, the ‘wingnut passion for “targeted tax cuts” or the (otherwise entirely laudable) progressive passion for not-yet-shovel-ready long-term infrastructure upgrades and… it actually looks entirely sensible.

Consider further than should healthcare reform pass in the next year it will almost certainly include family-planning components anyway and the proposal looks even more pragmatic.

So… why all the fuss? Especially from folks in public who privately support prevention-first style initiatives?

[** While not interfering in the least with planned, wanted pregnancies since patient participation is, duh, opt-in not opt-out. —fl]

Ellen Friedrichs of gURL Sex-Ed Blog points to a nice convergence between corporate self-interest and public health:

When I was in grad school, I was pretty amazed by how many sexual health services were available to students. We had peer counselors, a health center that freely gave out condoms, did on-site HIV testing and offered workshops covering everything from breast health to how to have an orgasm.

It was a far cry from my undergrad experience, where if there were any sexual health services I sure didn’t know about them.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who noticed the huge disparity in sexual health at different schools. The makers of Trojan condoms also identified this issue and, in light of what they call a “sexual health crisis,” decided to survey 140 schools and rank them on their sexual health.

She said it here.

Yeah, Trojan has involved itself in ranking schools by sex-health services because they have a direct interest in selling more condoms. But then every year U.S. New and World Reports ranks colleges because they have a direct interest in selling… oh wait! More magazines. Which might explain why Trojan’s list is actually helpful while U.S. News’s list, um, isn’t.

Anyway, the top ten places to go to school and stay healthy would be…

1. Stanford University
2. Columbia University
3. Cornell University
4. University of Iowa
5. University of Denver
6. University of Connecticut
7. West Virginia University
8. University of South Carolina-Columbia
9. University of Georgia
10. University of Wyoming

While the worst would be…

130. Marquette University
131. Utah Valley State College
132. Brigham Young University
133. University of Toledo
134. Baylor University
135. Louisiana Tech University
136. University of Notre Dame
137. Providence College
138. St. John’s University-New York
139. DePaul University

Hmm… looks like you can go to Stanford for an education and sexual health, or BYU for… basketball, I guess.