Women should not be the only party responsible for contraception use
Planned Parenthood’s website lists five male birth control options: the utilization of condoms, practicing abstinence, getting a vasectomy, the withdrawal method and “outercourse.”
To contrast, the list for female birth control is much more extensive, detailing nearly three times the amount of contraceptive methods. Included in this 14 item list of suggestions are “female” condoms, the sponge, spermicide, tubal ligation, an IUD, the NuvaRing, abstinence and oral birth control.
The abundance and variety of birth control methods for female bodies, and the lack thereof for male bodies, implies that the resistance of pregnancy is a sole female problem — ignoring the fact it takes two to tango.
A 2017 study by the Contraceptive Journal stated that if even 10% of heterosexual males took birth control, unplanned pregnancies in the United States would decrease by 3.5%, yet there is no push to finalize the development of a FDA-approved male contraceptive.
In 2016, a study tested a 96% effective injectable hormone that lowered sperm count, but was stopped due to side effects which its participants ruled were not worth its benefits. The side effects, listed in a 2016 Atlantic article, were “mood changes, depression and increased libido.” These, of course, are a few of the exact side effects women have experienced since oral birth control’s approval for distribution in 1960.
The weight of birth control’s side effects were examined through research conducted by JAMA Psychiatry. After extensively following one million women, they found that those who were prescribed hormonal birth control were additionally more likely to be prescribed antidepressants.
This arguably establishes both the dilemma many women experience in choosing between their reproductive freedom and mental health, and the truth that our culture is highly tolerant of the uncomfortable side effects birth control subjects women to, while being more than willing to save men from the exemplified scathe. Furthermore, this implies those with female bodies are the true inheritors of responsible contraceptive use in their heterosexual exchanges. This is a result of our culture’s normalized gender polarization, where the childcare labor is thought to be an exclusively women’s issue.
These beliefs were reinforced in the United States after World War II, when the Lanham Act, which provided subsidized child care to women working in the war industries, was repealed by the government and women were systematically fired from their war industry jobs as men returned from overseas.
For many white, middle-class neighborhoods, the post-War economy allowed for a breadwinner/homemaker family type, supported by a husband’s sole wage. This allowed women to aspire in being homemakers, doing the entirety of the household and childcare labor for the family. This may have been a feasible situation sixty years ago, but it’s 2020, and argubaly quixotic that minimal contraception options are available to men in order to support these pre-late-capitalistic ideals.
In a heterosexual encounter, the risk and burden of pregnancy, a financially-straining situation, regardlessly falls onto the female, who proves to average in making 15–20% less money than their male counterpart.
Information posted by Planned Parenthood quotes the average abortion costing between $350 and $950, and those who decide to go through with their pregnancies face a $10,080 birthing hospital bill (Business Insider). These costs of course do not include the endless prenatal and pediatric care pregnant women and their babies need, nor the millions of costly complications that could occur at literally any time.
This idea is again pressed while examining how medically-regulated birth control for female bodies is more effective than that for male bodies.
Male condoms, the most widely-available form of contraception for males averages to be 85% effective. To contrast, oral contraceptives, a widely-used and available form of birth control for female bodies averages at 99.9% effectiveness. Once more, women are the inheritors of an inconvenience both parties benefit from.
Discussing contraception expectations are a clear exhibition of our culture’s androcentrism, the sexist cultural practice that centers the masculine point-of-view and marginalizes the feminine.
Our culture’s expectation that women are to be the responsible party for contraception is unrealistic and further taps into our embedded, but false, ideas about gender.
