MIT Technology Review Subscribe

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.

Advertisement
This story is only available to subscribers.

Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.

Subscribe now Already a subscriber? Sign in
You’ve read all your free stories.

MIT Technology Review provides an intelligent and independent filter for the flood of information about technology.

Subscribe now Already a subscriber? Sign in
This is your last free story.
Sign in Subscribe now

Your daily newsletter about what’s up in emerging technology from MIT Technology Review.

Please, enter a valid email.
Privacy Policy
Submitting...
There was an error submitting the request.
Thanks for signing up!

Our most popular stories

Advertisement