Why are there no birth control pills for men? Are there not a scientific way to hinder the activities of sperm cells to make them unable to get someone pregnant?
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There are, but there hasn’t been that much funding for research into them because, to put it bluntly, men don’t care – they’d rather women keep taking birth control pills and dealing with the side effects of that instead. As such, these pills are a few years off yet, if they’ll even finish being developed at all.
Women have birth control because they have a built in “off switch” for ovulation (releasing the egg from ovary). That off switch is pregnancy. A pregnant woman doesn’t ovulate. Hormonal birth control mimics pregnancy levels of progesterone and estrogen to trick the body into not ovulating.
Men on the other hand don’t have a natural hormonal way to shut off sperm release. All we could do is stop sperm production, but to do this we would need to drastically reduce testosterone levels, which would have too many other consequences on the body.
There was but it was scrapped because it causes mood swings, acne, bloating and weight gain
There have been successful trials but no drugs have properly hit the market as they produce negative side effects which makes them considered not marketable. They are all similar side-effects to what hormonal birth control in women causes, but…
Condoms already exist and are pretty much the holy grail as far as safe sex devices are concerned. Cheap, easy to use, non-prescription, only needs to be applied at time of use, no side effects or potential complications, you can slather them in supplementary spermicide and it even protects against transmission of STI’s which no other actually accessible solution does. That is some difficult competition to up against for a male hormonal birth control on the market, so they dont get marketed.
While on the female side there just isnt a solution as good as condoms.
– Vaginal condoms do exist but are far more difficult to apply and are inaccessible for how rare they are. They also exclude the use of a male condom (rubber on rubber starts tearing), which isn’t true for the others. So its just an outright inferior solution to a male condom.
– Copper IUD’s can have grievous complications and application requires medical assistance.
– Cervical Caps and Diaphragms dont seem so bad but do require a prescription, aren’t particularly effective compared to other solutions and have to be applied and removed hours before and after sex.
In that environment hormonal birth control, either a daily pill or Mirena IUD, is just one of many options that kinda all suck so its able to exist alongside them. Though should also be mentioned that hormonal birth control does have the effect of stopping the menstrual cycle, which ignoring the actual *birth control* aspect is often reason enough for many women to use it.
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