Was in a discussion about this over dinner last night. My GF has like a dozen options: from pills, to implants and patches. I can either wear a condom or have surgery. I feel like there is always some male pill on the horizon that never manages to come. Why is it so hard to develop something for men but so easy for women?
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Women already have a super effective birth control built-in, pregnancy. So many types of birth control simply trick the body into thinking it’s already pregnant.
There’s no hormonal target that stops sperm production entirely without just about completely stopping testosterone, effectively chemically castrating someone.
I remember hearing about some gel that would be injected into men; I think it was called Vasalgel. That would be a nice semi permanent solution. Not sure if it didn’t pass FDA approval or if there is some other hold up.
Women’s bodies have a natural mechanism in place to pause the entire menstrual cycle (which includes releasing eggs). This happens during pregnancy. Female birth control gives women more control of that mechanism.
Men’s bodies do not have a mechanism to stop sperm production. So finding an artificial means to do that AND be reversible is much trickier.
The best way to look at reproductive cycles is like this:A woman is effectively a warehouse with a schedule. A female is born with all the eggs she will ever distribute via her reproductive system.
A man however is a factory/recycling system combined: His reproductive system is constantly manufacturing new sperm, breaking down and recycling old sperm as they age in the shelves and occasionally on happy occasions shipping out some sperm to an external warehouse.
It is a WHOLE lot easier to simply close the doors to that warehouse, put some blocks in the way of the chutes where the product comes sliding into the main loading zone than to have that entire automated factory/recycling center shutdown while keeping all the machines warm and ready for resumed operation with little to no risk to the machinery inside.
As is, nearly every attempt at male contraceptive systems has either been ineffective, or had phenomenally high rates of sterilization which obviously defeats the purpose of contraception since the goal is to suspend as needed and resume at will, not destroy the factory.
Simply put, we lack the proper bio-technology and understanding of the male reproductive system in a way that allows us to safely control it right now. It’s not sexism or anything, it’s simply that the female reproduction system at the lowest level is significantly less complex than the male reproductive system (minus the construction/assembly of babies…but that’s a whole other department in charge of that)
Two main reasons.
First, a woman’s biology has a built-in case where it will prevent pregnancy: pregnancy itself! A pregnant woman’s body won’t normally allow her to get pregnant *again* until the baby’s delivered, so if we hijack that system to trick her body into *thinking* it’s pregnant then we can avoid pregnancy altogether. Men – so far as we’ve found – don’t have any such built-in mechanism that’s as easy to exploit.
The other is side effects. Human reproduction is complicated and any attempt to mess with it is bound to cause side-effects. In women, these issues are known and not great but broadly less dangerous than being pregnant…but men are choosing between side effects with birth control or no *personal* health risk without it. That makes male birth control – especially during trials – a harder sell for men and they have a bad habit of dropping out of trials.
EDIT: My paragraph on side effects is under reasonable question – take it with a grain of salt (or a whole salt lick), as I may be under- or mis-informed there. See child comments like [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15mhcfg/comment/jvgeel0) with more information and links to dig through.
I am not a scientist.
The risks associated with female birth control (weight gain/loss, blood clots, etc) are compared against the risks of pregnancy, which has higher risks in every category.
The risks associated with male hormonal birth control (weight gain/loss, blood clots, mood swings, etc) are compared against your baseline, which is… not pregnancy.
So a male taking something that effects you hormonally has more risk than not taking that medication; where a female taking something that effects her hormonally but has *lower* risks than the result of not taking that medication (i.e. pregnancy) is a net benefit.
Say no hormonal BC is a 0 and a man’s risk taking it is a 5. Then say a woman’s risks of blood clots and all the etc in pregnancy is a 15 and the risks associated with the hormonal BC are a 5. Both risks come out to a 5, but a man would otherwise be at 0 and a woman would be at risk of a 15. So medical ethics determine the better choice is for men to not take the hormonal birth control.
a lot of good answers but im missing one. to get medicine aproved it needs to treat something and be less harmfull than what its treating. for birthcontrol for women, its preventing pregnancy which is a major medical event with a lot of risk, so its worth it. for men that isn’t the case, they don’t get pregnant so there is little risk to them. any medicine thus must be very low risk, which is pretty hard to do for something that messes with the systems responsible for sperm production. birthcontrol for women has a lot of side effects, if those side effects existed in male birth control i’m not sure it would be allowed.
There are natural mechanisms in a woman’s body that prevent new pregnancies: namely pregnancy. Birth control pills are an hormonal nudge that mimic an existing pregnancy, allowing effective control that is demonstrably reversible.
No such mechanism exists naturally in men. The chemical “nudge” is far more like hitting a brick wall. The scientific theory to find a chemical pathway that could _reversibly_ change a man’s fertility took a lot longer to develop, to test, and to market.
The female reproductive system is much more complex than that of men. It’s easier to mess up a complex machine than a simple machine because there are more places for it to fail.
In men the only place to really disrupt their system is sperm production and sperm mobility. The first isn’t simple to do because men are continuously producing more sperm and the latter needs to hit multiple millions of cells.
Meanwhile in women their system is set up with cycles controlled by hormones, so using hormones there are multiple ways to halt the system at a certain point or prevent part of the cycle from even happening. This is why there are different hormonal options that each person reacts differently too. You can also make the environment lethal to sperm because they are not omnipresent and the physiological space for such a device to be held and be much more easily placed.
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