The Junk Shot

The Junk Shot

On this father's day what better topic is there than the one of finding ways of avoiding this Holiday altogether.

Yeah, that's right. This is a blog about not having any reason to celebrate today. Well, besides saying hi to your own pop. But the main topic here is to avoid being the center of attention today by not being the father..



If only there was a way to prevent that from ever happening. I mean.. if only. Oh wait, there may possibly be a method and all it takes is One junk shot and that's all you need to be baby free for 10 years.

One Saturday in January 2010, Devendra Deshpande left his home in the Delhi suburbs and drove into the city to get a vasectomy. He was 36 years old, married with two young kids, and he thought it was time.

He arrived at the hospital around midday and met Hem Das, then the hospital’s chief vasectomy surgeon. Das had an interesting question for Deshpande. Rather than receive a traditional vasectomy, would Deshpande like to be part of a clinical trial for a new contraceptive procedure?

Das explained that the new method did not have some of the drawbacks associated with a regular vasectomy. First, sperm would still be able to escape Deshpande’s body normally, which meant he would be free of the pressure and granulomas that sometimes accompany a vasectomy. More important, it could be reversed easily, with a simple follow-up injection.

“I am normally not adventurous when it comes to getting myself operated on,” Deshpande deadpans. But the new method sounded good to him, and according to the published studies he read on his smartphone in the waiting room, it seemed safe. He gave his wife, Vinu, a call, and although she sounded nervous on the phone, she said she was fine with it. Deshpande decided to try the experimental method.

When his turn came, he lay down on the table, and an orderly draped his lower body with a green surgical cloth that covered everything but his scrotum. Then Das moved in with a needle containing a local anesthetic. Once the drug had taken effect, Das gathered a fold of skin, made a puncture, and reached into the scrotum with a fine pair of forceps. He extracted a white tube: the vas deferens, which sperm travel through from the testes to the penis. In a normal vasectomy, Das would have severed the vas, cauterized and tied up the ends, and tucked it all back inside. But rather than snipping, Das took another syringe, delicately slid the needle lengthwise into the vas, and slowly depressed the plunger, injecting a clear, viscous liquid. He then repeated the steps on the other side of the scrotum.

The procedure is known by the clunky acronym RISUG (for reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance), but it is in fact quite elegant: The substance that Das injected was a nontoxic polymer that forms a coating on the inside of the vas. As sperm flow past, they are chemically incapacitated, rendering them unable to fertilize an egg.

If the research pans out, RISUG would represent the biggest advance in male birth control since a clever Polish entrepreneur dipped a phallic mold into liquid rubber and invented the modern condom. “It holds tremendous promise,” says Ronald Weiss, a leading Canadian vasectomy surgeon and a member of a World Health Organization team that visited India to look into RISUG. “If we can prove that RISUG is safe and effective and reversible, there is no reason why anybody would have a vasectomy.”

The idea that's out of left field in this is that society and science maintained this notion that it's a lot harder to figure out how to stop a billion little sperms from reaching an egg than it was in trying to find a way to just make the egg not capable of taking the sperm. But it seems that this scientist in India has managed to develop an injection for men that has so far proven to be 100% effective... and more to the point, completely reversible with no side effects with a single other injection.

Want to see this in action? Why the fuck not..


Yeah, it's a needle to your balls.. so that alone will probably scare away a lot of people. But let's be real, it's a small gauge needle and topical pain killer, so it's not going to hurt by any significant amount. It'll probably feel like getting acupuncture.. you know.. with some pliers to your white tube.

Besides that, women have to endure far worse pain on a regular basis. In a sense we've become really big pansies in all this. We're not getting pap smears annually. So this is a pretty damn reasonable solution for monogamous couples who do not want kids.. or any more kids. Besides all that, don't you want to never have to worry about showing up on Maury in future shows like this:



Sign me the fuck up! No more worrying about broken condoms or missed birth control pills. The very idea of not having to ever wake up in a cold sweat in some fear that you have to pay 18 years of child support and not appearing in those episodes will make your life a whole lot less stressful.

And don't think this is just for those losers and dead beats out there who just can't afford a jimmy hat or are too dumb to put one on. Think of our ex-Governor or John Edwards. Where would their careers and popularity be if this scientific breakthrough was around for their time of crisis?

All those baby free/I'm late phone calls will be a thing of the past. No longer will you wonder if Aunt Flow will be showing up or if you somehow screwed it up in screwing up. You will walk with a stride to your step knowing that your boys, while they can swim, aren't carrying any payload that you need worry about.

And not to sound like an anti-feminist for any moment, but on the contrary, this makes the miracle of birth an equal power item now. Before women had the final say on the life of a child. Now you don't even have to get to that bridge anymore as it was burned down.

Not to say that women are trifling minx or anything, but there has been many situations where a child was born because the girl decided to not take her birth control in an attempt to create a "save our relationship" baby. In that thinking that a baby will be the answers to a bad relationship that is on the way to failing.

Now that I think about it, it really does turn the power completely around on this whole situation. For too long women were in charge of all this stuff, but now men can cut them off at the knees here and really be sneaky in making sure that they don't have children. Then if they go somewhere else to get knocked up under the assertion that it's yours.. the guy can say "Nope, my boys aren't active - here's a doctor's note saying exactly that!"

Wow, can't this medicine come out sooner? I wouldn't want it to be pre-mature or anything, but this is all sorts of excitement in the world of birth control.

Oh yeah, Happy Father's day... Baw ha ha, the numbers of those celebrating that day may soon be way down.