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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Male contraception relieves women of that burden

You would think so, but... there are women (maybe a lot of them) who think the loss of power over conception would be bad for women [0]. Read the column. I don't know about you, but it gives me a very queasy feeling. Like there is some subtext that this woman believes she should be able to force parenthood on an unwilling partner.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/apr/28/malepi...

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Contraception isn't a zero sum game. Giving men more contraceptive power doesn't take anything away from women.

You are right, but that's not what the article the GP linked is about. It's based on two (IMO very flawed) arguments, one, that men having the option of birth control forces women to trust them (which may be true, but is a problem faced by men today), and two, the – quite creepy – belief that women should be able to unilaterally decide when a couple starts having offspring. (As if men were not legally beholden to care for their offspring.)

The argument in the first paragraph of that article addresses the issue of having to choose between distrusting partners, or being vulnerable to those who lie about using birth control. There's maybe some merit in that, but today, men face the same problem.

The rest of that article is… creepy. That's way more than subtext.

I can't even...

> At the moment it is the woman who retains control over the moment at which that melting in the bones feeling is allowed to over-take the firm "no this would ruin my life" feeling in the head.

Is not the whole point of contraception insurance againt emotional losses of control?

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