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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From a legal perspective, in the US, for FDA approval a drug has to show the majority of side effects are less potent than the risk of not using the medication.
So for women, with the health risk being pregnancy, the allowance for side effects is higher. For men, there are no health risks, technically speaking; so the allowances for side effects are basically zero. Even things like mood swings, lower hormone levels, etc. are unacceptable to meet the criteria.
It isn’t necessary nefarious, just the way the approval system is arranged. Globally, I cannot speak outside the USA, so I honestly don’t know if it is similar reasons or a completely different one all together.
EDIT: I was unaware it was causing suicide in the trial studies.
Female/men instead of female/male?
Condoms and vasectomies are infinitely better than the options women have. IUDs are very dangerous and get scar tissue grown around them at times, permanently impacting women’s ability to reproduce, and birth control is a hormone altering drug that results in all kinds of shitty side effects. I got a vasectomy a few years ago and it took 10 minutes. For a woman to get a vasectomy, it’s a major procedure and most doctors won’t do it unless the woman is a certain age.
The question is, why are men’s birth control options so good and women’s aren’t.
Because it’s easier to put the burden on women. I’m male, and it amazes me what my wife goes through and I find it baffling how in this day and age for every $12 of medical research spending on men’s health there is only $1 of spending on women’s health. And why? Because men make the decisions on where that money gets spent. Pregnancy in the west has always been a women’s concern and responsibility. Women were shamed and held responsible for the pregnancy, not the man. So why burden men with birth control?
I get that it’s a bit of a confusing argument, but I guarantee you that if more women had a say in where healthcare research dollars get spent, we’d have a male birth control pill and a test for endometriosis instead of Viagra and telling women to just “deal with the pain” and that there’s nothing that can be done about a horrible condition like endo.
There was a fantastic summary on YouTube by MamaSoctorJones which discusses this. A large part is men suffer no mortality from childbirth so the risks of BC complications are not justified. Stupid, yes, but that’s a major factor.
Why do you word it as females twice but the only time you mention males you use men? 🤔
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I talked to a a very good doctor about this. I don’t know about some of the explanations here (maybe they’re right that it is “easier” to make hormone pills for women). But according to her (my doctor), much that has to do with the treatment of different sexes also has to do with old ways of looking at things like sex and genders. Today, doctors are both men and women, but they still live in societies that thinks in certain ways about sex, and about men and women. For instance, this very good doctor thought it was very dumb to vaccinate young women against viruses called “Human Papillon Viruses” (HPV for short). This was a new vaccine then, that worked well against this terrible virus that cause cancer with women. Men do not get sick from it, so doctors had always treated women for it, not the men. But this virus always start in a man. Men are the carriers of such viruses, not women. Women can only be infected from a man, not from another woman (unless that woman has kissed a man).
So, my doctor said, vaccinating all young women instead of all young men is like peeing upstream and then trying to sort it out downstream, instead of stopping someone from peeing in the stream. It doesn’t make sense, but everyone involved is too deep into thinking in a certain way about the problem to see it.
I don’t know how much of this applies on birth control. But when I read about the history of pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, I noticed that traditionally (both socially and in big politics) “bad women” have always been seen as the reason for all sexually transmitted diseases. Also, women were often blamed for getting pregnant, not the men. Over a hundred years ago, all politicians and doctors where men, and women couldn’t vote or become doctors. When these politicians and doctors talked about pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases to come up with solutions in their very big and important buildings, they discussed prostitutes as if they were part of the sewer system. The politicians wanted the sewers to be there for all men, but not be seen. The only trouble was that prostitutes sometimes got pregnant and also spread diseases. (In fact, men like these politicians were the ones making them pregnant, and often infecting each other with sexual diseases that women only could pass on, not carry).
So for over a hundred years, the solution to any problem regarding pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases had to do with treating women, not men.
That is most probably a big part of why science and the men of science never bothered to invent pills and birth control for men to begin with, which is not impossible at all.
Another reason is that men do not want the same side effects that women has had to endure since the revolution of the birth control pill in the 1960’s. Here is an article about it:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230216-the-weird-reasons-male-birth-control-pills-are-scorned
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