Slashdot Mirror
Drug Companies Plan Male Contraceptive Pill
TamMan2000 writes "I can hear the trolls now, with their jokes about how nobody who reads slashdot will ever score... But, incase any of us ever do score the male pill could soon be a reality."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I think that the technology/knowledge to create birth control pills for men has been around for a while. I imagine they will be much safer, too, since sperm is manufactured on a frequent regular basis, the pill would just have to affect that process. It could probably be taken as little as 24-36 hours before sex to have its effect, and it would most likely not affect hormone levels.
It's just that pills for men have this one little problem:
Zero Accountability.
Oh, sure, if you're using them because you're in a committed relationship and don't want your honey to get pregnant, they'd be useful as heck.
However, one of the reasons that birth control pills for women work so well is because the women taking them have a *huge* incentive to take them -- they don't want to get pregnant. So, they're much less likely to forget a dose.
On the other hand, consider a player. He may even have pills, but forget to take them. It'll be important to him, but not as present in his mind as it would in a woman's, because the effects for him are not so dire. For the player, it might rank just above flossing as a priority.
Also, imagine men saying, "Honey, it's cool, I'm on the pill." A woman has no real reason to lie and say that she's on the pill if she isn't, and if she does lie then she has to suffer the consequences.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Never heard of Old Dirty Bastard's 10 kids by 9 different women?
Never heard of the Jerry Springer "I want your baby and your money" Show?
There are many women who lie about using the pill for the express purpose of getting pregnant. Whether they do it for money (ODB) or for love (Jerry Springer style), they do it.
A guy who sleeps around isn't looking to have a family and would more likely to be diligent in taking the medication correctly. It's a pill in the morning, not some series of injections. It's easy for a playboy to prevent exactly those things that would hamper his playing. Except for STDs of course.
There has been no technical or biological barriers to producing a non-painful or non-surgical male contraceptive drug like this.
Excuse me? Stopping sperm production is non-trivial. There is no natural mechanism for stopping sperm production, like there is for egg production. Doing it with drugs has generally required something like large doses of Testosterone, which has serious side effects and isn't consistent enough for practical purposes.
Stopping egg production, on the other hand, is relatively simple, and there are various natural mechanisms in place for doing so, such as pregnancy and excessively low body fat. Low body fat is obviously a difficult thing to maintain, especially at the level where it effects fertility, and again it isn't consistent enough to be considered effective. Pregnancy, however, is very consistent, even across the animal kingdom. I don't know of a single creature that is fertile during pregnancy.
This consistency, and the fact that it is a natural mechanism, is why there are birth control pills for women; because it's easy, not because of some aleged (imagined, IMO) prejudice that birth control is a woman's responsibility. It is a fairly simple thing to mess with a woman's biochemistry and make her body think it's pregnant, which is exactly what every birth control pill, shot, or implant does (and if you think women get side-effects from those, just wait until you have to deal with an actual pregnant woman on a daily basis!)
does it fuck with your emotions and hormonal balance in the ways the pill, Norplant and Depo do to women?
Of course it does, they only question is how much. There's no way it could work without messing with your hormonal balance, and there's no way your hormones are going to get messed with without having emotional and physical side-effects. The trick will be the same as it has been for female birth control; balancing effectiveness against side effects (dosage), and trading off more annoying side-effects for less annoying ones (formula).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I think that the technology/knowledge to create birth control pills for men has been around for a while. I imagine they will be much safer, too, since sperm is manufactured on a frequent regular basis, the pill would just have to affect that process.
Wrong on pretty much all counts, actually.
Stopping ovulation in women is straightforward - you're trying to stop a once-a-month event, and the female body already has a shut-down mechanism built in (ovulation stops during pregnancy). The pill just triggers this mechanism (tricks the body into thinking it's pregnant).
Men are designed to produce sperm all the time. There is no built-in shut-down mechanism to trigger. You also have to stop production of *all* of the hundreds of millions of sperm cells produced between sexual encounters, as opposed to stopping just one egg from being released. A male contraceptive that eliminates 99.9% of sperm production is still useless.
And because you're trying to inhibit a function that's never normally shut down, you have to start from scratch when figuring out how to do it, and live with the fact that a male contraceptive that's 100% effective runs a real risk of causing permanent damage if not very carefully designed.
It could probably be taken as little as 24-36 hours before sex to have its effect, and it would most likely not affect hormone levels.
Hormone manipulation is just about the only way to affect sperm production. What do you think drives it? Hormones are the body's signalling system for stopping/starting body processes.
It's only now, after decades of research, that relatively safe, reasonably effective approaches to male contraception are being developed, and we have a long way to go before they're mature.
boys should not be able to get their drivers licences until they have the valve installed. It will be closed by default. It can only be openned once the man is out of college and has a job.
We should invest money is this! Big brother at it's best. Imagine how few losers would be around!
(No, I'm not serious. But i think it's funny.)
A speech...
The fewer humans the better.
I've said it before, and i'll say it again...
Abortion doctors are america's greatest heroes.