– We are always hearing about breakthroughs in male birth control but I never seem to hear about it again. Why is this? Is there a reason why multiple different forms of male birth control never seem to materialize for sale?

Question

– We are always hearing about breakthroughs in male birth control but I never seem to hear about it again. Why is this? Is there a reason why multiple different forms of male birth control never seem to materialize for sale?

In: Biology

Answer 1

With female hormonal birth control, we “trick” the body into not accepting pregnancy by changing the hormone levels to something like “already pregnant” – a natural state for the body.

This has both positive and negative health effects (many use them for milder period pain, less bleeding etc, unrelated to the birth control function) and last I read about this, the average health effects were net positive. All in all, a fairly natural trick, low risk, even beneficial in most cases, easy to invent.

With male birth control, we are somehow trying to poison or disable one of the body’s highly prioritized functions – producing viable sperm, which has no natural cycle or method of shutting down or taking breaks that can be exploited – it just keeps functioning until it breaks.

Producing an agent that will shut down or damage viable sperm production enough is fairly easy – administering it so it doesn’t damage anything else in the body and making sure the production can recover fully afterwards is likely very, very hard. Even harder, it must not affect the “potency” which the whole function is tied to.

I would guess the most likely successful methods would be local injections into the scrotum (but who wants that?) or some sort of sticker/salve for local application, but that gets messy or could fall/sweat off etc. Just eating a pill would be SO much harder for it to not cause side effects elsewhere.

So to your question;

“*We are always hearing about breakthroughs in male birth control but I never seem to hear about it again. Why is this*?”

The best explanation is likely a combination of the difficulties described above, and the same reason that much of the cancer research you hear about in the news never materializes; it is fairly easy to produce an agent that disables sperm production or kills any type of cancer, and to get funding you shout from the rooftops that you have invented this wonder drug and it looks promising! … But the challenges of delivering it to an actual human without causing dangerous side effects prove too great and the project gets shut down.