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Trial For The Male Pill Shows No Side-effects
Blahbooboo3 writes "Men concerned about contraception may soon be able to use the male equivalent of the Pill, without the potential side-effects of a drug based on altering the balance of sex hormones. The drug, called Adjudin, works by disrupting the interaction that takes place in the testicles between immature sperm cells and the nurse cells responsible for nurturing sperm to maturity. The germ cells need to adhere to the nurse cells for sperm to properly develop, and the drug prevents this bond from forming. It looks like it will be a gel patch type of applicator."
This may well be the most irrelevant Slashdot story ever. No one who reads this site is in any position to use this pill. You can't get your hand pregnant.
So far, this study has been done on mice only and the dosage was applied only once. The BBC has a decent write-up about it. Hopefully this will be applicable to humans, but many believe the exact drug will not work on human males.
I came, I saw, She conquered.
Someday you're going to be looking at your overgrown lawn and wishing you didn't have to mow it. This is where kids come in.
Male pill...the man puts it in his shoe and it makes him limp.
You're using her as bait, Master!
I think this scenario leaps to mind because it's a real fear. It's actually following your point about men being equally "responsible." Right now men are equally responsible under the law, but they do not have equal options or control of the birth control.
Think of taking this pill as Paternity Insurance. When some random girl you hooked up with one night (who swore she was on the pill) shows up 9 months later with a baby, a DNA test and a lawyer who will nail you for 18 years worth of child support you might be wishing you did.
And enough with the whining about side effects. Anabolic steroids can make your hair fall out, your epiphysia (growth plates) fuse prematurely, cover you in zits and make your nads shrivel to the size of raisins.....but some of you will take em anyway.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I keep seeing comments here to the effect that "no woman will or should trust a man that he is on the pill".
That's not the point of there being a male pill. The point is that men no longer have to trust women to be on the pill. If a guy is on the pill, he doesn't have to worry that the woman will say she is on the pill and then go off it, trapping him into supporting a child that he never wanted to gave. Imagine switching the gender roles there: say there was only male contraceptives, and the man says he's on the pill, but he wants a kid, so he stops taking his bill, and yay, now he's got a baby and a mom to take care of it, too! But what if the woman didn't want kids yet? "Well then... she should have been having sex, should she? It's her own fault for chasing cock," someone in this bizarro world might say.
But most of us (besides the abstinence-only types) would think that was a ridiculous response. She engaged in an activity trusting her partner's word that certain consequences would not occur because of measures he had taken. When he fails to take those measures, it's not her fault for trusting him and engaging in the activity, it's his fault for failing to keep his promises. Switch the pronouns here so it's a woman reneging on her word instead and the situation is not different, but plenty of people will harp on a man and say "well you should have kept it in your pants".
Even setting aside these issues of trust, the man being on the pill *and* the woman being on the pill is extra backup in case one of them should simply forget.
The point of this isn't that the burden of birth control can now be shifted to the men and women don't have to take the pill. The point is that now men have a way of making sure that they don't get someone pregnant that they don't want pregnant. If a woman also wants to make sure that she doesn't get pregnant when she doesn't want to, she can take her pill too. In a couple where both people don't want kids and so both are on the pill, extra protection in case one fails or is simply forgotten. In a couple where the woman may want a kid and try to trick the man into giving her one (and subsequently supporting it), or perhaps where the woman is just forgetful (as everyone can be sometimes), the man now has a means of protecting himself, instead of just relying on the woman.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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