Mens Reproductive Health

Traditionally, most reproductive health programs focused on family planning and in turn most family planning programs offered their services exclusively to women only. Most programs concentrate on women only. Most viewed women as the target group and paid very little attention to the roles that men might have with respect to women's reproductive health decision-making and actions.

A few programs made efforts to address men's requirements for information and services, with these efforts mainly focused on encouraging men to use family planning techniques such as condoms and vasectomy or to become more active in the couple's decision-making about contraceptive use. Some programs also provide sexually transmitted infection (STI) treatments to men.

Like women, men have reproductive health issues that change as they move through their life cycles. As the course begins to reach out to men as partners in ensuring good reproductive health, they will want to understand these changing needs as well as other factors influencing men's sexual performance, objective, and awareness.

Boys are influenced by cultural and medical practices linked to reproductive health as soon as they are born. For instance, in some regions infant boys are regularly circumcised (in other regions, circumcision is performed when a boy reaches adolescence or not at all); research from developing countries has shown that male circumcision decreases the risk of HIV-infection by at least 50 percent.

As boys reach teenage years, they experience important physical changes, including changes in their voice patterns, growth of pubic and body hair, and enlarged development of muscle tissue. These physical changes are often accompanied by new emotions and behaviors, including the development of sexual feelings, testing with sexual encounters, and questions about sexual issues, such as penis size, sexual orientation, and masturbation.

A boy's experience of and response to these transformation is shaped to a large degree by the gender roles and prospect prevalent in his culture. Boys also may be susceptible to sexual abuse. As young men become more sexually active, their anxiety are parallel to those of many young women and include sexuality, intimate relationships, peer norms, and prevention of unintentional pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

These issues may affect men and women at dissimilar times in their reproductive lives and to different degrees, however. For instance, men do not suffer the serious and sometimes deadly results of pregnancy, childbirth, and unsafe abortion. Nonetheless, men in unions may share many of the same concerns as women about family planning, including how to prevent pregnancy, how to make decisions related to the number and spacing of their children, whether contraception is safe, and how to select and use a useful contraceptive.

Preventing and treating sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS, also is a key health fear of sexually active men. Many men also are worried about infertility, especially given the high occurrence of STIs in some areas and concerns that some male infertility may be connected to environmental or occupational exposure. Men too have become aware and are alert about these issues that may be a big concern as far as health is concerned.

• John Palsson
• 13/05/2009, 3:59 AM
• 0 Comments