As scientific discoveries go, the male contraceptive pill has long been considered the unicorn of reproductive healthcare – much touted, but frustratingly elusive (in part, hindered by big pharma’s lack of desire to fund research).
But on Sunday, Washington University scientists at the annual Endocrine conference hailed early trials which showed that a once-daily tablet that lowers sperm production seemed safe and effective in preventing pregnancy.
The trouble is, in the time it’s taken to develop a male hormonal pill, attitudes to contraception, particularly among thirtysomethings, have moved on, with swathes of women abandoning the pill and hormonal coil for condoms or contraceptive apps.
The future of reproductive health is part digital, part hi-tech latex, but not hormonal.
Suddenly this much-longed-for solution may already be obsolete.
The history of the contraceptive pill is fraught – fraught with a thousand examples of women who took charge of their reproductive destiny at the cost of their physical and mental wellbeing.
As Julie Burchill once put it: “The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the 1960s largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.”
Despite the touted liberties of the female pill, many feminists fantasised about the male equivalent as a matter of biological and social justice.
But given the many miserable side-effects for women of hormonal contraception – everything from lack of concentration to severe depression – the appetite for a male drug is weak.
Even the Male Contraceptive Initiative estimates it at under 50%.
Even though the Washington scientists conducting the trial of 100 men aged 18-50 say that dimethandrolone undecanoate – the drug’s chemical name – had no pernicious side-effects, long-term trials are now needed to gauge the effects for a far larger sample of the male population. And the finished product is still a long way from market.
Even when the long-term trials are complete, female contraceptive scientists such as Herjan Coelingh Bennink believe that big pharma is currently run by too many resistant middle-aged men, who will take some persuading to manufacture and sell it.
It may be high time that men stepped up to the plate when it came to taking more contraceptive responsibility, but in the meantime women have already come up with a better solution for themselves.
Case in point – Elina Berglund, a former Cern physicist who gave up her work on the Large Hadron Collider to create the Natural Cycles app, which prevents or helps plan a pregnancy by having the user take their basal temperature each day and input the number into the app, which then predicts ovulation and fertile v infertile days.
It’s already a well-adopted solution: cheaper, safer and more informative than any of its hormonal counterparts – and while it again puts the onus on women rather than men, it seems to be an onus that many women, particularly digital natives, are prepared to bear. Continue reading
- Nichi Hodgson writes about sex and relationships
- Image: Global Dating Insights
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