 We continue sharing thoughts and perspectives from MCI staff members with this conversation with our Advocacy Strategist Kathryn Carpenter. Kathryn initially joined MCI as a Fellow from the UNC Gillings School of Public Health and now champions many of our advocacy efforts including the creation and management of MCI’s Youth Advisory Board. In this post, she shares her motivations for working at Male Contraceptive Initiative as well as her thoughts about male contraception.
 Md Abdullah Al Noman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Minnesota. He has been working with MCI grantee Dr. Gunda Georg, on the development of male contraceptive agents. He was named as one of MCI’s 2020 predoctoral fellows and in this blog post he shares what he hopes to learn as a fellow and discusses the challenges in the field of male contraception
 Introduction An organization’s vision, mission, and values are its heart and soul. They act as the North Star that guides all organizational activities, from strategy to execution. Male Contraceptive Initiative identified the need to update and revise these defining organizational statements in order to improve our impact and better evolve towards and align with current realities.
 As we have been sharing in previous posts, sharing people’s perspectives and opinions about male contraception is an integral part of MCI’s outreach efforts. In an effort to continue sharing the thoughts and perspectives MCI staff has on the topic, we sat down and spoke with our Communications Strategist, Nica Daria. In this post, she shares her motivations for working at Male Contraceptive Initiative as well as her thoughts about male contraception.
 This guest blog post comes is written exclusively for Male Contraceptive Initiative by freelance journalist Raizel Joleigh.
The topic of contraception can be contentious. Women have a host of options when it comes to birth control, and these come with their own dialogue that deserves an avenue of its own. For men, though, the only methods currently available on the market are condoms or vasectomies – unreliable and costly to reverse, respectively.  We sat with the Intended showrunners to get a behind the scenes look at the creative journey of producing this science-based dialogue all about the past, present, and future of male contraception. Here’s a Q&A with our own Heather Vahdat, Logan Nickels, and Kevin Shane.
 As we shared in a previous post, gathering and sharing people’s perspectives and opinions about male contraception is a key advocacy effort of MCI’s. Though we often try to gather these perspectives from the public, we also wanted to share some of the perspectives MCI staff has on male contraception. In this post, we share our conversation with Executive Director Heather Vahdat as she talks about her motivations for working at Male Contraceptive Initiative as well as her thoughts about male contraception.
 Gathering and sharing the perspectives and opinions about male contraception is a key mandate of MCI’s. Through this, we are able to present a collective voice in illustrating the interest in and demand for new methods of male contraception. By extension, this allows us to dispel some of the misconceptions about the field that persist. This includes investigating topics that do not garner as much attention as others, such as men’s attitudes and experiences with unintended pregnancy and the contraceptive needs of the LGBTQ+ community.
 We cite a statistic all the time – that close 50% of pregnancies, both in the US and globally, are unintended. And that’s a staggering number. But we often don’t talk about what is intended.
 This blog post is by Heather Vahdat, MCI Executive Director.
The National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently published a brief related to sexual activity and contraceptive use among young people between the ages of 15-19 in the United States. Given that young people are a key population for us at Male Contraceptive Initiative, I found the report to be interesting across the board; however, one key finding particularly caught my attention: “The condom remains the most commonly used contraceptive method among female teenagers”. In fact, 97% of female teenagers who have had sex reported ever having used a condom. |
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