Men can’t even remember to bring home the milk half the time, so what do you think of asking them to take a birth control pill?
A story on LiveScience addresses the issue:
Female hormonal contraceptives gave women unprecedented control over their reproductive health with the approval of the pill on June 23, 1960. But a similar male version has never reached the market. Physiological differences between men and women’s reproductive cycle, along with economic and regulatory problems, have stood in the way of a male pill for 50 years, scientists say.
The main difference between designing a contraceptive for men, as opposed to one for women, is the number of reproductive cells that the pill would need to stop, said John Amory, associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. Whereas a pill for women only needs to prevent the release of a single egg once a month, a pill for men faces a larger, constant challenge.
“People have been trying to develop a male analog to the pill ever since the female pill came out. Turns out its much more difficult,” Amory told Life’s Little Mysteries. “The biological barriers are nontrivial. Women produce one egg a month, and men produce 1,000 sperm per second. It’s much harder to stop that higher production system.”
Unless you’re actually going to stand there and watch him down the pill, how would you even know if he took it? The idea sounds waaaaaaay too risky.
Would you trust your man to take the pill, instead of you?
