In over 30 years of practice, Dr. Errol Billinkoff rarely saw a man without kids come into his Winnipeg clinic to get a vasectomy. But since the pandemic began, he says it's become an almost daily occurrence.
And he's not alone.
"At first, I thought I was the only one who was noticing this," Billinkoff, who brought a no-scalpel vasectomy procedure to Winnipeg in the early 1990s, told CBC News in a November interview.
"But I am part of an international chat group where doctors who do vasectomies participate and the topic came up, and it's like everybody notices it."
Men literally only have 2 options: condom or vasectomy. Condoms don't feel good for either side, which is why both try to avoid using them. Vasectomies can be reversible, but require surgery and thus are costly, which of course makes it impossible or at the very least much less attractive for a large portion of society.
Yes, men can buy underwear that heats up their balls to temperatures that kill sperm, but I'd like you to go around spreading the word of discomfort through sweaty balls and see how far you get.
You know what feels way worse than condoms but is just as effective? Celibacy. Don't complain about how the sex you're having isn't good enough, say that the risks to your partner aren't important enough, or tell them that they're the only one that needs to be responsible. I can't imagine the type of person that would still sleep with you with those attitudes. (If you feel like fluid bonding with a person, great, that's your choice, but some of us don't want to, have multiple partners, or can't)
Your 3rd option is chemical castration, which is kind of like taking the pill for decades.
That's not really an option comparable to taking the pill. Firstly, it isn't meant to sterilize, it works by effectively removing a person's ability to become aroused. It also comes with a ton of side effects like reduced testosterone, osteoporosis, suicidal thoughts, etc.
At least with a condom, a guy can still have sex.
The pill gives women multiple side effects that can be debilitating yet men still prefer the woman take care of birth control.
Granted, but generally women are still able to have sex on the pill. Chemical castration removes that ability entirely, on top of the side effects.
Presenting that in a thread discussing men undergoing voluntary surgery to sterilize themselves while stating that men make women handle birth control is a bit of a hot take there.
Men prefer women to do it because women are the only ones with non-permanent options that are 99.x% effective.
Fact is, only the female body has a built-in 'mode' that naturally shuts off fertility, that pharmaceuticals can 'trick' the body into activating, making creating effective contraception for females extremely easy compared to the difficulty level for males.
There is no one to blame for these biological facts of the matter. They are as they are, all we can do is work with what we've got.
There's another wrinkle: pregnancy is a health risk for females, and is the consequence for unprotected sex for them. Males have no equivalent thing that happens to their body as a result of unprotected sex. Contraception needs to be at least as safe as the alternative to be viable. Therefore, female contraceptives need only to be less risky than pregnancy to be viable, while male contraceptives need to be less risky than doing nothing, to be equivalently viable.
Again, this is not anyone's fault. That's just how it is.
Chemical castration is not birth control. Firstly, it rarely actually results in complete sterility. Secondly, it's whole purpose is to remove sex drive and the ability to feel arousal. Chemical castration in men is closer to women taking an estrogen blocker than it is to hormonal birth control.
I guess if you consider abstinence to be birth control then you could call it birth control because it enforces abstinence. But ultimately the issue is just that sperm production is far less dependent on hormones than eggs being released. Hormonal changes in men can can easily result in a large reduction in fertility but it is very difficult to cause complete infertility short of physical means. Even trans women who are several years into hormone therapy (without srs obviously) can remain fertile.
Yeah, I can already hear the hordes dashing to the urologist for that.