I’m absolutely not advocating for removing that option. However, increasing the options for male birth control is necessary for a wide variety of reasons, including allowing male partners to take the burden off of their female partner if she isn’t able to tolerate the side effects or can’t find a birth control method that actually works well for her. It is, in effect, another birth control option for women to be able to defer some responsibility to a male partner in a committed relationship.

It’s not a great option for more casual encounters or early in relationships, but for established couples that already have children and don’t want more or are in a committed, trusting relationship, male birth control opens the possibility for the male partner to ease the burden of birth control effort and side effects.

Vasectomies are a great option, but there are a lot of folks who don’t want a permanent birth control so they won’t get a vasectomy.

Women and girls end up with suicidal ideation all the time when going through the trial and error process of finding the right hormone combination. There’s dozens of different formulations of hormonal contraceptive pills and it can be extremely difficult to find the one that will work for you with the least amount of side effects.

The suicidal ideation is so common that it just gets lumped into the fast-forward list of side effects alongside the potential for life-threatening blood clots and other things.

I think men should consider the potential harms to their partner in their calculus. If a man participates in causing a pregnancy that results in serious complications or death, I would sincerely hope that he would be as devastated by the loss of his partner as he would by suffering the harm himself. If men can’t empathize with their partner enough to consider the risks to her, then he shouldn’t be having sex in the first place.

Non-surgical birth control options for women tend to come with a lot of side effects and a number of risks that don’t always outweigh the benefit. Hormonal birth control can cause tons of problems for the women taking them and some of them are associated with life-threatening side effects like increased risk of clotting leading to DVTs, PEs, and strokes.

They’ve tried, but they can’t get FDA approval because the men in the clinical trials aren’t able to tolerate the side effects that pale in comparison to common side effects of hormonal birth control for women.

Then the just and equitable thing to do would be to shift some of that burden to men to make things easier for the women that aren’t able to “tank” the side effects that can include some life-threatening complications.

I would also like to point out that the leading cause of death of pregnant people in America is intimate partner homicide, so the dangers of pregnancy can also be directly caused by the male partners. Y’all need to toughen the fuck up and get your shit together to do your damn part of preventing unwanted pregnancy and calling out the bad behavior of your peers that eventually escalates to things like rape or intimate partner homicide.