Why a Birth Control Pill For Men Is Still Not Here

Birth control options suffer from a huge gender imbalance, leaving women shouldering most of the load, and men with little besides condoms or a vasectomy to choose from. As a story in Bloomberg today reports, research in male contraception is experiencing a new wave of interest, including one scientist who is resurrecting a compound first investigated in an experiment on prisoners in the 1950's.

But as we have reported, funding for development of "the pill" for men still lags shockingly far behind programs that make contraception avialable to women. That's partly to do with the fact that safely stopping millions of sperm from being produced every day isn't as biologically straightforward as stopping one egg from being released each month. Still, there are researchers out there—not to mention a willing market—who want to help even the playing field, but they're going to need support in order to do it.