Every morning, Alex Baldwin smears a few pumps of gel across his shoulders and waits for it to dry before getting dressed. “You have to be patient, otherwise it sticks to your clothes,” he says. “But there are worse things to live with, as Mary will tell you.”
Mary – Baldwin’s partner, Mary O’Driscoll – has experienced detrimental side-effects from contraceptive methods including the combined pill, the contraceptive implant and the mini-pill, which gave her “a nonstop period for, like, two months”.
Baldwin’s morning application of gel – formulated to dramatically but temporarily suppress his sperm count – means O’Driscoll can soon forget about any of that and have her current form of contraception, a coil, removed.
Baldwin, 24, the co-founder of an oat milk
