Birth Control for Men in Our Lifetimes?

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My mother always joked to me that if men could get pregnant, they’d have birth control pills in vending machines, just as readily available for mere cents all across the country as condoms are. I always came back with the idea that they’d have drive-thru abortion clinics, too, where men could also get slim jims and soda while they get the procedure done unabashedly, perhaps on the way to the game.

Ever since I had to start my own birth control as a young adult, I’ve always wondered when men would get their own version. My birth control has failed me, made me ill, made me bleed nearly to the point of hospitalization, and definitely screwed with my hormones so much that I am positive that I’m not 100% myself when I take it. But I also know that I can afford neither the cost nor the health risk of permanent sterilization, and I have to prevent a pregnancy from developing or I will have a high risk of death again, too. (And while our plan is to get my husband sterilized instead, every time we plan it out the money ends up going to some other emergency, as it tends to do with every other lower-middle class family I know.) It’s just pretty screwed up that women have to jump through hoops like this for a safe method of birth control when men can pretty easily get erection medication.

So when I read articles like this one about how we may be getting closer to a male oral contraceptive or other type of birth control, I get hopeful, but only cautiously so. Why? Because I’ve been hearing about it for years. And since we’ve had the drugs available for women for decades, I really think that we could have had it available to men, too, if it weren’t for the stigma associated with birth control as being a “woman’s issue.” The last time I checked, a woman couldn’t get pregnant without a sperm donor of some sort, after all.

The thing is, apparently men all over the world want this medication, too. That’s definitely a good thing, and I would think it would be enough to get a fire lit under the research and move it along a bit faster. Maybe if men put a little more pressure on the pharmaceutical industry for a male contraceptive other than condoms (and let’s face it, we should all pretty much use them unless we’re in a monogamous relationship, but they’re definitely not as much fun as we tell young adults they are), we’d get the meds that we’ve needed all along to help empower men to take control of their reproductive organs as well as take some of the pressure off women in the process. Just think if your partner could take an oral contraceptive with no side effects when you can’t, how that would affect your relationship. That actually excites me—but, again, only cautiously so.