Heather Vahdat has been advocating for male contraceptive options for nearly a decade, but she is the first to say it is a lonely space to occupy in the health science field.
Vahdat is the executive director of the Male Contraceptive Initiative, based in Durham, North Carolina, which has been working with a single donor to provide up to $1.5 million in grants per year for emerging male birth control technologies since 2017 — and that makes it the second largest funder of that type of research in the U.S., second only to the National Institutes of Health.
At the moment, the options for men are limited to condoms and vasectomies, Vahdat said, and while vasectomies can potentially be reversed, it doesn’t always work.
Vahdat says demand for male contraceptives was already stronger than most would guess, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022 was a tipping point.
“After Roe fell, women looked around and said, ‘What can you do?’ and men looked around and said, ‘Crap, what can I do?’” Vahdat said. “Men are waiting for this; I think it’s really underestimated how much attention men are paying to this.”
Cody Romero, a 32-year-old single Idaho resident, said he will be happy to take any method of male contraception once it is available, especially in the current environment of abortion restrictions.
After all, even with the birth control methods that are available for women, a recent estimate showed half of the world’s yearly pregnancies are unplanned. In the United States, as of 2019 data from the Guttmacher Institute, about 45 pregnancies out of 1,000 in women between the ages of 15 and 44 were unintended.
“I don’t like the idea of getting someone pregnant. That’s scary,” Romero said. “I always feel bad for the ladies that do get on birth control and struggle with some of them. It’s like, ‘Well, this is my fault as well.’”
Romero had only heard of a study on hormonal pills for male birth control that was cut short after some of the participants experienced adverse psychological effects — that was in 2016. But he said he is open to any method, particularly since he does want children at some point and doesn’t want a vasectomy at his age.
Romero said among the men he knows, subjects like contraception are rarely talked about. But if more options became available, he thinks many of them would be interested in taking the contraception burden on themselves.
“Right now, it just feels like that’s not something they need to take care of. ‘It’s someone else’s problem’ sort of thing, that’s the impression I get,” Romero said.
READ MORE. This story is written and reported by our media partner The Virginia Mercury.
