I hate Mr Tumble. I was in the dressing room for Match of the Day and he was next to me. The reason I hate him - well, I don't hate him for what he does, it's just that I've had to sit through it four times with every kid. It's got to the point now where I just can't. He's the reason I've got the snip. I couldn't have another kid to go through it again.
But when our second child was born nine years ago, we weren't 100 percent sure we were done, so I got another IUD. We decided pretty quickly that two kids were enough, but we also decided there was no point in a vasectomy, because I already had a reliable form of birth control that would last until I was 47.
The recent death of Mary "May" McGee, the brave woman who took the landmark 1973 case on access to contraception in Ireland, was in the forefront of my mind for several days. Any woman who is popping her daily contraceptive pill or buying condoms without a second thought owes her a great debt. Men who have undergone vasectomies may not necessarily know to whom they owe their great debt, as such.
Jack Fertility, an Oxford-based men's healthtech startup, has raised more than £500,000 in pre-seed funding to launch Snip Check, the UK's first home-to-lab postal vasectomy test kit, and accelerate development of its broader range of male reproductive health solutions. The round was led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Microsoft angels, Alma Angels, The Beam Network, Moonstone Venture Capital, FemTech Lab, Founders Factory's Reckitt Benkiser Accelerator, and the Oxford Seed Fund.