
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, May 23, 1995                   TAG: 9505230109
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BIRTH CONTROL WOMEN'S WORK?

Nearly 70 percent of American men do not think they can be counted on to choose a birth control method, and women agree with them, according to a poll released Monday.

In a Harris poll for the Kaiser Family Foundation of Menlo Park, Calif., 73 percent of the women said men were ``not responsible enough'' to choose a birth control method, and nearly 70 percent of the men agreed. Both sexes said men were uninvolved because they ``don't care'' and because they considered birth control the ``female's responsibility.''

The study was conducted for the foundation through telephone surveys of 2,002 adults between October and November 1994. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.

The lack of male involvement in birth control, experts say, contributes to unplanned pregnancies, estimated to account for 40 percent of births. Men who are misinformed about contraception tend to fail to support a partner who is informed and are less likely to use a condom when asked to.

Family planning experts say men are uninvolved partly because clinics focus on women and ignore men, largely because clinics lack money.

``We have a family planning system set up for women in terms of how to choose contraception,'' said Dr. Freya L. Sonenstein, the director of the population studies center at the Urban Institute, a domestic-policy research organization that has also released new data on men and contraception. ``But there is nothing for men. Public policy holds men's feet to the fire in terms of increasing child support, but we haven't done anything on the other side in terms of trying to reach them before that point.''

Because for men there is no equivalent of the regular gynecological exam, and because men do not get pregnant, there is no established place for them to receive birth-control information.

Since most of the contraception choices for women require a prescription, and condoms require only a trip to the drugstore, family planning clinics have catered to women since their inception.

by CNB