You Can’t Trust A Man With Birth Control

(And that’s OK.)

Last week, news circulated that we’d inched closer to a male contraceptive pill after Australian scientists identified two proteins that could be knocked out to render mice infertile. As usual, this led to the inevitable (and by now excruciatingly boring) series of vox pop articles on the theme “can you trust a man with birth control?”.

But even stupid, hackneyed questions deserve an answer, so I’m going to give you one: No. No you can’t trust a man with your birth control. And that’s OK. Because that’s not the point of a male contraceptive.

It’s natural that “contraceptive” has become synonymous with “birth control”, given that historically it was women that had the most to gain from a contraceptive. They were the ones who’d be left (literally) holding the baby should they fall pregnant. But in conversations with female friends, I’m surprised how many fail to appreciate that they still retain the ultimate veto over a pregnancy. As a man, I have control over my reproductive rights only up to the point of sex. After that, my opinion about the right course for any resulting pregnancy is just that — an opinion. I can bitch and moan, I can head for the hills or sign up with the Foreign Legion, but in the end I don’t get to decide what happens to a woman’s body, and that’s the right and proper way of things.

Contraceptives, as the name suggests, are conception control. Birth control — control over a woman’s reproductive process — is a woman’s exclusive right and ought to remain so. So when I see the question “can you trust a man to take a contraceptive pill?” I will sigh and roll my eyes. It’s not simply a dumb, sexist question; it ignores the fundamental purpose of a contraceptive, which is to offer control over the reproductive rights of those that use it. Whether you are a man or a woman, you shouldn’t really be trusting anyone with your reproductive control except yourself. The point of a male contraceptive isn’t to foist responsibility over birth control onto men, but to offer them an additional layer of control over their own reproductive rights. And in any equal society, that’s something I think we should all welcome.