SEXUALLY ACTIVE people of the world, rejoice! Soon, you’ll be able to get your freak on with just a little bit more peace of mind. If all goes well, by 2017 we could have a male birth control method that’s not the condom on the market, one that could allow ladies to ease up off the pill and allow monogamous couple to ditch those loathsome, intimacy-killing rubbers. The product is called Vasalgel, a gel polymer that’s injected into the vas deferens, reducing the flow of sperm by blocking the tubes which transport sperm from the testes. Essentially a vasectomy minus the ol’ permanent snip-snip, scientists working on the project claim that the procedure can be reversed by flushing the vas deferens clear of Vasalgel with another injection. Currently, successful studies are being conducted on baboons, and human trials could be happening as soon as next year (although a trial with a similar product has been going on in India for a while now).
The Parsemus Foundation, the organization pursuing the concept, has conducted the study on three baboons so far. In a nutshell, they basically got the randy buggers loaded up on Vasalgel for six months and then let them get their freak on with 10-15 lady baboons as much as their animalistic tendencies compelled them to over a month’s time. Sounds pretty much like your average frat guy’s sex life — at least, what he’s hoping it’ll be. So far, there have been zero baboon pregnancies despite all that unsheathed lovemaking. Good news for the Parsemus Foundation! Further studies on baboons are currently being prepared, and if everything keeps going as planned, the Parsemus Foundation will move on to conducting studies on human baboons men.
This is obviously major news. Women have always had to carry the blunt of the internal birth control prep and maintenance, most of which is hormonal — if not an actual wire implanted somewhere in there à la IUD. No option — whether it’s the pill or injections or implanted devices — is without its fair share of risks, and for some women hormonal birth control isn’t even an option at all. You’ve never felt raging hormones until you’ve been prescribed the wrong type of birth control for your body and felt like a werewolf was trying to claw its way out of your skin while you cry and try to refrain from tearing down walls. Who knows? In a couple years’ time, the boys could be heading to the doctor to get their own birth control shots. Although, it would be guys who get the non-hormonal version of birth control. Come on, scientists, you can’t do the same thing for women? It’s been, what, more than six decades since the pill came out? Just sayin’.
Ah, well, jealous griping aside, this is a more-than-welcome scientific advancement. Think of all the pressure that will be released from all the guys who really haven’t had that much control in the birth control department, other than donning a rubber, taking his partner’s word that she’s on BC at face- value, and praying a lot. Gone will be the popular sitcom storyline where the women pokes holes in her diaphragm or the condoms in an effort to sneak-attack a pregnancy on him. Thank God, because that is so tired and so far from the truth in so many, many cases.
Just think: male birth control + female birth control = much better odds at not having an unplanned pregnancy than what we’ve been working with so far.
You can’t argue with math.
