Birth Control Pill for Men Being Developed

The Pill. It empowered women sexually and provided an important cornerstone for the women's revolution that is going to mark our era in history. Now word is that there will be a pill for men to take once every few months to make them functionally sterile.

Here's what it boils down to: Women, would you trust your man to remember to take this? The researcher who developed the new pill thinks you will.

Time cites The Telegraph and is a little more readable for Americans:

In the search for a form of male contraception that can rival the female birth control pill, a team of researchers from Israel may have just made a breakthrough. As the Telegraph reports, in initial animal trials the team of researchers found that a pill they'd developed — which works by stripping sperm of a protein necessary to fertilize an egg — was able to create temporary sterility in mice for one to three months, depending on the strength of the dose.

Researchers plan to start human trials with the pill next year, and estimate that it could be available to the public in as little as three years. One of the major concerns about developing an effective pill-based form of male contraception is that men might be less likely to remember to take it every day. Yet, should it prove effective in humans, men would only need to take this tablet once a month or once every three months. As Haim Breitbart, a researcher at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who helped develop the pill, told the Telegraph:

"I think most women would trust their man to remember once a month or once a quarter."

In recent months the ongoing search for a reliable form of male birth control other than the condom has yielded clues about everything from how sperm swim to the potential for using ultrasound to disrupt sperm production and create temporary infertility.

Read the full Telegraph piece here.

Developing a once-a-month male birth control pill?

The risks and costs of pregnancy are not equally allocated to both members of a couple. In general, the male can walk away from a pregnancy and the female has to deal with it, it's a basic biological fact and is the fundamental reason that women need to be granted full decision-making authority over their own reproductive systems. On the other hand, there are a lot of good reasons why a man would want to control the consequences of his sexual behavior.

It will be interesting to see if this new approach is successful, and if it does reach the market, do people really take advantage of it. I have the feeling it is not the next Viagra.