Bring out the balloons, champagne flutes, and noisemakers. Look what the cat is dragging in come 2017: MALE BIRTH CONTROL NOT IN THE FORM OF A CONDOM! (The Daily Beast)- Are men treated differently than women when buying emergency contraception? (New York Daily News)
- Overriding Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto, Republican lawmakers in Missouri have forced a 72-hour waiting period for abortions into law. They now join South Dakota and Utah as having the longest waiting periods in the United States. Additionally, there are no exceptions for victims of incest or rape. (USA Today)
- Texas gubernatorial candidate, Wendy Davis, bravely shares her personal abortion story. (Cosmopolitan)
- Crowdfunding platform, GoFundMe, has banned all fundraisers and content related to abortion. What other safe, legal medical procedures have they banned fundraisers for, you ask? None that we know of. (Salon)
- Is there any facet of the anti-choice movement that isn’t hypocritical? The corporations opposing the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act mostly do not offer any parental leave to help you out with the baby they want you to have no choice but to conceive. (RH Reality Check)
- Republicans have seemingly done an about-face on birth control, and have been talking an awful lot lately about the Pill being made available over the counter. Please don’t be fooled. They want the entire cost burden to be on the individual woman rather than covered by insurance. I’m trying to think of any other preventive medications they feel this way about off the top of my head, but for some reason I’m drawing a big ol’ blank! (Time)
- Bustle has an interesting piece on the most restrictive abortion laws in America and, as you may have guessed, it’s really quite painstaking to get an abortion anywhere in this country. (Bustle)
- Vaginas are magic and powerful vessels and now their contents can make medicine! (Nature)
Tag Archives: RISUG
Expanding Options for Male Contraception
Condoms are the only contraceptive device that does double duty in preventing pregnancy and STD transmission. But will men’s birth-control options expand?
Many have wondered why there is not a male equivalent to the Pill. The short answer to this question is that the release of one egg is easier to prevent than the flow of millions of sperm. The longer answer to that question includes a litany of failures in the search for such technology. Currently, however, there are some interesting developments in male birth control.
The condom, of course, is the only birth-control method to do double duty in reducing risk for both pregnancy and STD transmission, but many heterosexually active males would like more options than the tried-and-true rubber, and their female partners, despite having expanded contraceptive options — including the Pill, the patch, and the IUD — might prefer for the men in their lives to help shoulder the birth-control burden.
One method under investigation is ultrasound, a technology that has been around for quite some time. Though scientists have been aware of its contraceptive potential since at least the 1970s, most studies have been conducted on nonhuman animals (though human trials could be on the horizon). Ultrasound involves the application of high-frequency sound waves to animal tissue, which can absorb the sound waves’ energy as heat. The possibility for ultrasound’s use for contraception operates on the idea that briefly heating the testes, which in mammals are normally kept a few degrees below core body temperature, can halt sperm production, leading to temporary infertility for about six months. Additionally, ultrasound could affect cells’ absorption rates of ions, which itself could create an environment unfavorable to spermatogenesis. Its extremely localized effects on animal tissues make ultrasound an attractive candidate for research.
One small study conducted on five dogs applied ultrasound to the canine testicles three times over a period of a few days. The researchers compared sperm count before the procedure to two weeks after the procedure. After the ultrasound treatments none of the canine sperm samples contained sperm. Side effects included tender testicles that had been reduced in volume. Continue reading