“Do you mean to tell me that women can only get pregnant a few days out of the month?” This is an actual question I was asked during an in-depth discussion on fertility and birth control I once had with a group of male friends. It was a fair question, and they were right to be surprised! Most women may wonder just what men know about birth control. The answer? Not much! Most men I know are simply not taught much about female reproductive health. Or, they avoid learning about it altogether. After all, how many times have we heard the phrase ‘no uterus, no opinion?’ As the discussion went on, the questions kept coming:
“Sperm can live for 5 days after sex?”
“What is the difference between the fallopian tubes and the uterus?”
“A fertilized egg implants in the fallopian tube, right?”
“The IUD blocks the sperm from getting into the vagina, right?”
“The IUD releases hormones?”
“Birth control uses artificial hormones?”
These questions led to hours of discussion, countless Google searches, and a realization that most of our female partners had displayed some of the side effects of hormonal birth control at some point in time. More importantly, this discussion provided me with insight into the relationship the average man has with women’s health and birth control. I want to share the lessons I took away from this discussion with you. My goal is not to shame the average male’s lack of knowledge surrounding women’s reproductive health. It’s to identify those deficiencies so we can better correct them.
Lesson 1: What men know about birth control and female fertility is subpar
During the conversation, one thing became clear. Men don’t know nearly enough about women’s reproductive health. And that perplexed me. But then I realized that after being married for so long I forgot that I too used to be single, with little knowledge or interest in women’s health.
The realization made me think back and ask myself, “How did I learn about female cycles, anatomy, and mechanisms for different birth control?” Only a limited amount of knowledge was taught in school. The curriculum was more concerned with pushing condoms on us rather than addressing these topics. My parents were another source of knowledge, but they could usually only offer limited explanations. Besides that, I didn’t pursue any further knowledge about the subject.
I recognized that most of what I learned had largely come from my wife. Years of going to the gynecologist with her and switching birth control brands forced me to learn about the topic. But not every guy has a woman in his life who is willing or comfortable enough to explain the intricacies of the women’s health world to him.
Lesson 2: Many men lack knowledge because parents “pass the buck” on educating them about reproduction
“Why didn’t we ask these questions or have these conversations with our parents?” was the question I posed to my buddies. I wanted to find a root cause for the knowledge gap. The answers were all very similar. “If we talked about birth control, our parents would think we were sexually active. And even if they knew [we were], they didn’t want to address it. And if we asked about the female reproductive system we would be perceived as weak or even abnormal for caring.”
I should note here that my friend group wasn’t unique in these feelings! In fact, we were probably pretty par for the course. A survey conducted on 1000 men discovered that 50% of men learned about birth control from a teacher or parent. 12% learned from a girlfriend or significant other. That’s right! Only half of these men had parents or teachers as resources to teach them about women’s health. The survey respondents were also more likely to turn to the internet rather than a parent or a doctor to answer their questions. Now we can more clearly see where the lack of knowledge and misinformation stems from.
Lesson 3: Men typically let women struggle alone with birth control decisions
During the conversation, a troublesome discussion point arose. There was a notion among my friends that women were on their own when it came to birth control decisions. After all, it’s ‘her body, her choice,’ right? Again, this notion isn’t an outlier. According to Cosmopolitan magazine, a 2016 survey they co-commissioned with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (which became Power to Decide in 2017) found that 1 in 3 men think it’s a woman’s job not to get pregnant. Interestingly, the survey data is not publicly available, per the Power to Decide website. But according to Cosmo’s summary, “46 percent say that at least half the time they’ve had sex in recent years, they didn’t even know if their partner was using birth control!”
One friend even described how his girlfriend had bled for months while initially starting to use the Nexplanon implant (he referred to it as the “hormone arm thing”). He had chosen to stand by silently because he believed it was what she wanted and her decision alone to make.
This specific example felt familiar to me because my wife also attempted to use Nexplanon and it was a disaster. I watched her suffer for months through acne, weight gain, appetite changes. As if that wasn’t enough, she also bled for over 7 months. “Why was she willing to continue putting up with it?” I wondered. Yet, she pushed through those 7 months simply because she had assurance from her doctor that she wouldn’t get pregnant while using it. When we finally decided to address the issue, she was still reluctant to go back to the doctor and ask for a change. Even after 7 months!
When I decided to get involved
It took several months of back-and-forth dialogue on the subject, but I refused to leave my wife alone to struggle with the side effects of her birth control. I helped her weigh the pros and cons, and ultimately encouraged her to return to the doctor about it. To make matters worse, the doctor resisted and countered her decision to no longer use the Nexplanon! If I hadn’t been in the room with my wife, she would have had to argue her case alone. She might have even given in to the doctor’s pressure to keep enduring the harsh side effects of that particular form of birth control. I shared this unsatisfactory experience with my friends (and I’m sharing it with you, now) to demonstrate that a man’s buy-in, when welcomed by his partner, can make a positive impact on her reproductive health decisions.
Lesson 4: There are much better family planning options out there
Bad experiences with Nexplanon and other forms of hormonal contraception are more common than most men likely realize. Side effects range from suicidal thoughts, to loss of libido, and even blood clot development [1]. That’s why some women are switching to more natural Fertility Awareness Methods (FAMs) that don’t rely on the use of hormones for contraception, and are up to 99% effective with perfect use. Sadly, knowledge about the harsh realities of birth control and about the existence and efficacy of FAMs isn’t common knowledge among most men. Case in point? My friends immediately googled ‘Symptothermal Method’ (which is one particular FAM) in the midst of our discussion because they simply didn’t believe me when I brought it up.
I couldn’t blame them because I hadn’t learned about these natural forms of birth control until I was married. The idea that logging and charting a simple basal body temperature every morning, along with cervical mucus observations, could provide so much information was as foreign to my friends as it once was to me! After all, these methods aren’t discussed in high school health classes (and, as organizations like FACTS know, neither are these methods discussed in most medical schools). Nonetheless, this new information excited my friends. Knowing that their significant other could be free of the side effects listed above motivated my friends to research the subject, and prompted many of them to bring it up at home.
Lesson 5: Men want to help!
So what do (most) men know about birth control? Very little, it’s true. Where does this low level of knowledge come from? It’s a sad result of all of us–men and women alike!– having been conditioned to accept hormonal birth control as the universal answer to avoiding unplanned pregnancy. Many men and women also believe it’s solely a woman’s choice alone what she uses for birth control. In other words, many believe, male input is not only unneeded, but unwelcome. I think that a clear result of this conditioning is that men have been trained to be silent at best and apathetic at worst about the subject.
However, these unfortunate realities can be remedied. What men know about birth control now certainly isn’t all they can ever know. The biggest lesson I learned when talking to my male friends about women’s health and birth control is this. Men care about this stuff, and want to help their partners. After getting over the initial “uncomfortable” threshold, my friends’ curiosity and concern took over. That curiosity and concern propelled them to start forming their own opinions on different contraception methods. Some of them even began to learn how Fertility Awareness can improve their love lives! All these men needed was a little push and some knowledge to open up a whole new world full of information they never knew existed.
References:
[1] Skovlund, Charlotte Wessel et al. “Association of Hormonal Contraception With Suicide Attempts and Suicides.” The American journal of psychiatry vol. 175,4 (2018): 336-342. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2017.17060616Additional Reading:
Shocking reasons why birth control lowers women’s sex drives
Blood clots and hormonal birth control
