There are surprisingly few children in foster care eligible for adoption. I’ve looked into this. Foster care is temporary care, and many children “in the system” are staying with family.
I wouldn't call >100,000 kids surprisingly few, temporary foster care is indeed a much larger body at over 400k, so around a quarter are looking for homes.
The article mentions traditional hormonal contraceptives don't work for men. This is a new approach, blocking a targeted receptor. I'm not aware of any such contraceptive for women. The apprehension in that case is understandable as it is not backed by the same experience as hormonal methods
There seems to much more concern about side effects than is exhibited for women’s birth control.
The unwillingness to even try to sell a male birth control because if fears about a side effect profile that matches what women can deal with is a good indicator of just how fragile the drug manufacturers think men are.
This comes up every time male contraceptives come up, it's emotionally compelling but just isn't true.
The safety equation for men and women differs vastly. The pill is acceptable at its current safety level because the alternative is pregnancy which can be lethal. Plus the various uses in cycle control, important not just for fertility but also hormone management.
For men there is no downside to not taking the contraceptive, so it must boast a much higher safety profile to be considered. As it stands, the current attempts were either much too dangerous (higher rate of adverse responses than the pill) or too permanent, nothing to do with the fragility of men - perceived or otherwise.
Your sentence is illogical and reveals a lack of understand for the underlying biological processes.
The women's pill emulates and controls an existing hormonal cycle that naturally regulates their fertility.
There is no such natural hormonal cycle for men, that regulates their fertility.
If I saw some technical similarities between those two processes I would not oppose hormonal control pills for men, but the male and female bodies work differently.
There are absolutely hormonal cycles for men. They’re not as apparent as the menstrual cycle, but they’re there, and we need not fixate on the word “cycle” either.
Hormonal birth control for males exists. Usually by dropping testosterone which isn’t a great idea.
My point is not that hormonal treatments for men is advisable but that there are non trivial consequences for both genders.
What are you talking about? the pill can have severe health consequences, it is absolutely not harmless. The pill also doesn't necessarily work for cycle control - and frequently has the opposite effect - and the majority of women already have reasonably regularly spaced periods.
"For men there is no downside to not taking the contraceptive," at least we're in agreement here that the entirety of the risk is placed on women, for whom requiring medication with major detrimental side effects is acceptable.
Let's be very clear though, your comparison to the health risks of being pregnant is at best irrelevant: if the parties involved are using some form of birth control it is reasonable to assume that the goal is not to have a child. In which case it is incorrect to be comparing the risk of pregnancy with the risk of hormonal birth control. The correct comparison is between hormonal (or similar) birth control, and other forms of contraception, just as it should be in men.
However as the comments in this thread indicate, all the risks that are present in women's hormonal birth control are considered too dangerous to be prescribed to men.
Or reversible infertility in males is much harder to induce by drug with relatively few side effects than in females. Hormonal birth control works by tricking the body into thinking its pregnant, a state in which fertility is naturally suppressed. There is no analog in males.
> a side effect profile that matches what women can deal with
Do we in fact know that the side effects (of which method?) are equivalent to female birth-control (again - which?), or are you speculating? And is avoiding unknown side-effects a sign of fragility, or caution?
Well if you look at what happens to women when they don’t have contraceptives, the cost/benefit ratio tends to allow quite a few costs.
For example, blood clots. Hormonal birth control causes blood clots. But nowhere nearly as often as pregnancy.
Would you apply the same reasoning for men? There’s a school of medical ethics that says treatments must focus exclusively on good outcomes for the patient.
According to this school of thought, prescribing a man a pill that has a .001% chance of blood clots to prevent his female partner from having a .01% chance of blood clots is unacceptable.
And this is a very, very influential line of thought among doctors.
> very, very influential line of thought among doctors
I'm not very "rah rah we currently live in a patriarchy", but wtf? Is it not elementary to consider GROUP effects when dishing out medicine? If a couple (most of the people where the women is taking birth control) come into a doctor's office with that blood clot predicament, it should not be very hard for a doctor to consider them as a couple, when they can clearly communicate that they care about their total health equally.
If our medical system is mostly only able to consider the primary patient, unable to prescribe medicine taking into account the second order effects in that person's life to people they care about, then our medical institutions are (even more) flawed.
I think I would support some sort of government incentive for this.
It's good for everyone if people are encouraged to make sacrifices that net benefit society. In the long run, everyone should benefit (if the sacrifices and benefitees are equally distributed enough).
Hormonal birth control causes blood clots in women all the time, including those not trying to get pregnant?
Why are we dealing with a binary that is a woman wants to get pregnant vs not wanting to? In the case where pregnancy is desired birth control is by definition irrelevant.
So the correct thing to compare is the health risks to a non-pregnant woman vs the health risks to a man, and the risks from pregnancy have nothing to do with it.
Are you getting fragile about there being two different reactions to… two totally different drugs with two completely different mechanisms of action and two incredibly different safety records? Hormonal birth control has been out for ages and has many benefits outside of preventing unwanted pregnancies. Male birth control still isn’t even a safe thing yet, in 2022.
Notably this team is not using a hormonal approach, but is targeting a protein to induce temporary sterility. This seems pretty good at first glance. A hormonal approach for men would probably go very poorly.
It’s kinda funny to imagine that civilization collapses because we invented hormonal male birth control and didn’t anticipate that this would lead to… war.
Male hormones have a habit of (re-)shaping the world, for better or for worse.
Yea, I certainly agree. But what if this leads to a cohort of aggressive males that do not accept this new innovation. They'll breed more and proliferate, while the BC males do the opposite. A war of alphas and betas is finally upon us. The aggressors are coming now, just over their horizon. I can't quite make it out yet, but their standard is coming into view. Dark red border surrounding a pale yellow background, and something ... green? in the foreground.
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[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadhttps://www.revolutioncontraceptives.com/vasalgel/#151994272...
Anyone waiting for Vasalgel may as well fly to India and get a RISUG injection.
No thanks, give me the kids.
The unwillingness to even try to sell a male birth control because if fears about a side effect profile that matches what women can deal with is a good indicator of just how fragile the drug manufacturers think men are.
The safety equation for men and women differs vastly. The pill is acceptable at its current safety level because the alternative is pregnancy which can be lethal. Plus the various uses in cycle control, important not just for fertility but also hormone management.
For men there is no downside to not taking the contraceptive, so it must boast a much higher safety profile to be considered. As it stands, the current attempts were either much too dangerous (higher rate of adverse responses than the pill) or too permanent, nothing to do with the fragility of men - perceived or otherwise.
The pill can wreck women’s hormonal cycles. It’s hardly a given that it will “control” them.
One could also say the pill can control women's hormonal cycles. It's hardly a given that it will "wreck" them.
Thankfully the pill is one of the many female contraceptive choices.
The women's pill emulates and controls an existing hormonal cycle that naturally regulates their fertility.
There is no such natural hormonal cycle for men, that regulates their fertility.
If I saw some technical similarities between those two processes I would not oppose hormonal control pills for men, but the male and female bodies work differently.
Hormonal birth control for males exists. Usually by dropping testosterone which isn’t a great idea.
My point is not that hormonal treatments for men is advisable but that there are non trivial consequences for both genders.
> A hormonal approach for men would probably go very poorly.
I would have liked to continue a discussion, but it seems like you actually understood the problem but pretend not to, in order to troll someone.
"For men there is no downside to not taking the contraceptive," at least we're in agreement here that the entirety of the risk is placed on women, for whom requiring medication with major detrimental side effects is acceptable.
Let's be very clear though, your comparison to the health risks of being pregnant is at best irrelevant: if the parties involved are using some form of birth control it is reasonable to assume that the goal is not to have a child. In which case it is incorrect to be comparing the risk of pregnancy with the risk of hormonal birth control. The correct comparison is between hormonal (or similar) birth control, and other forms of contraception, just as it should be in men.
However as the comments in this thread indicate, all the risks that are present in women's hormonal birth control are considered too dangerous to be prescribed to men.
Do we in fact know that the side effects (of which method?) are equivalent to female birth-control (again - which?), or are you speculating? And is avoiding unknown side-effects a sign of fragility, or caution?
For example, blood clots. Hormonal birth control causes blood clots. But nowhere nearly as often as pregnancy.
Would you apply the same reasoning for men? There’s a school of medical ethics that says treatments must focus exclusively on good outcomes for the patient.
According to this school of thought, prescribing a man a pill that has a .001% chance of blood clots to prevent his female partner from having a .01% chance of blood clots is unacceptable.
And this is a very, very influential line of thought among doctors.
> very, very influential line of thought among doctors
I'm not very "rah rah we currently live in a patriarchy", but wtf? Is it not elementary to consider GROUP effects when dishing out medicine? If a couple (most of the people where the women is taking birth control) come into a doctor's office with that blood clot predicament, it should not be very hard for a doctor to consider them as a couple, when they can clearly communicate that they care about their total health equally.
If our medical system is mostly only able to consider the primary patient, unable to prescribe medicine taking into account the second order effects in that person's life to people they care about, then our medical institutions are (even more) flawed.
But when you adopt an attitude of “you’re going to have to take one for the team” that’s where the principal comes into play.
It's good for everyone if people are encouraged to make sacrifices that net benefit society. In the long run, everyone should benefit (if the sacrifices and benefitees are equally distributed enough).
Preganancy can cause very bad outcomes. Therefore it's more appropriate contraceptives development focus on women.
Think of it this way - a guy says "yeah I'm on the pill ... no of course I didn't for get to take one of the pills yesterday ... trust me."
Why isn't this as reassuring as a woman stating she's on birth control?
Why are we dealing with a binary that is a woman wants to get pregnant vs not wanting to? In the case where pregnancy is desired birth control is by definition irrelevant.
So the correct thing to compare is the health risks to a non-pregnant woman vs the health risks to a man, and the risks from pregnancy have nothing to do with it.
https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/male-birth-control-cont...
Notably this team is not using a hormonal approach, but is targeting a protein to induce temporary sterility. This seems pretty good at first glance. A hormonal approach for men would probably go very poorly.
Male hormones have a habit of (re-)shaping the world, for better or for worse.