TY - JOUR T1 - Increasing male participation in the uptake of vasectomy services JF - Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care JO - J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care SP - 64 LP - 65 DO - 10.1136/jfprhc-2012-100406 VL - 40 IS - 1 AU - Hari Singh AU - Ashutosh Mishra AU - Dawood Alam AU - Vivekanand Pandey Y1 - 2014/01/01 UR - http://jfprhc.bmj.com/content/40/1/64.abstract N2 - In India, family planning is considered to be the woman's responsibility and tubal ligation is much more popular compared to vasectomy. For every 98 women who undergo tubal ligation, only two men accept vasectomy, which reflects a serious imbalance and indicates gender inequity. About half the women in India are reported to be anaemic and a large proportion has reproductive tract infections. If not cured of reproductive tract infections, it is inappropriate for these women to undergo tubal ligation or have an intrauterine device inserted; use of contraception by husbands could be a better alternative. For men, a safe, simple and effective method of permanent contraception is No Scalpel Vasectomy (NSV). This is an improved technique over conventional vasectomy with minimal pain, no incision, no stitches and no blood loss. The entire procedure can be completed in 20 minutes and the client can leave the clinic after 1 hour. He can resume strenuous work 2 days after the procedure. It has been known for decades that the myths and misconceptions around vasectomy or NSV are the main barriers to its acceptance. People relate it to conventional vasectomy that is a relatively major procedure. They feel that NSV results in weakness such that they will not be able to do rigorous manual labour to earn their livelihood after the procedure. We conducted in-depth discussions with communities and health providers in an effort to understand what exactly they mean by weakness and why they link physical weakness with NSV. We learned that although people talk about physical weakness, their main concern is sexual weakness, which is a topic that they are hesitant to discuss. We learned that … ER -