- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 2
-
Sparkle (2)
“What do you guys know about male contraceptives, other than condoms, withdrawal and abstinence?” I asked my 9,000 Twitter followers this afternoon, who despite being usually chatty, largely refrained from responding. The few who responded, less than ten, mostly mentioned vasectomies. One asked, “isn’t there a male version of The Pill now?”
Photo by Grace Hebert.
Yes. Well, sort of. A lot of potential solutions to the question of a male version of the contraceptive pill have been discovered, but they remain in various phases of testing.
In 2003, the National Institute for Family Planning in Beijing published a paper describing largely positive results for a monthly injection of testosterone undecanoate, which showed to be 94% effective in preventing pregnancy. They are currently in phase III.
Adjudin, a non-hormonal drug capable of causing reversible infertility in rats, was in phase II of human testing in 2007. It was found that taking the drug orally required such high dosage that it could cause damage to muscle tissue and the liver. A solution to prevent this side-effect was found, and testing appears to be on-going.
Nifedipine, a calcium channel blocker, has been found to cause reversible infertility. Testing on mice, Israel’s Bar-Ilan University found that it effectively alters the metabolism of sperm, rendering them unable to fertilize an egg. A monthly pill for men, many reported in midsummer of last year, could be as close as five years away.
At around the same time Columbia University Medical Center announced that they were testing a compound that interferes with the body’s ability to use vitamin A, leading their male mice to become sterile for the course of treatment – without losing their desire to mate.
Phenoxybenzamine, which is commonly used to treat hypertension, and Silodosin, used to treat enlarged prostates, have been found to also block ejaculation, without affecting a man’s ability to achieve orgasm. In 2008, researchers set out to find drug alternatives that achieve the same effect, but are specific to the inhibition of fertility.
That’s just a handful. And then, of course, you have a variety of hormonal treatments, which directly affect the production of sperm, and which require support to maintain a man’s testosterone levels normal. One of them, presented as a variety of gels to be applied topically, was announced ready for testing in May of last year at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center’s Male Contraceptive Clinical Trials Center.
But because so many of these potential anti-fertility options remain in various stages of testing, and because the notion of seriously interfering with one’s hormones is not one men are eager to pursue, many are opting for vasectomies.
In 2008, a piece in Details magazine reported on the sudden popularity of the procedure among men in their 20s and 30s:
Even after a less invasive no-scalpel technique was introduced in the United States in the mid-eighties, the surgery was considered an extreme measure. But lately, vasectomies are becoming the province of young, single men who claim to be tired of worrying about their partners' vigilance with the Pill. So rather than use condoms -- less than ideal in terms of pleasure and, compared with vasectomies, which have an estimated 1 in 2,000 failure rate, only so-so on the contraception front -- they're opting for a permanent fix.
In a follow-up this year, Details reported that the vasectomy business in this country is booming: “The Associates in Urology clinic in West Orange, New Jersey, has seen a 50 percent jump in the procedure. So you could stress over starting a college fund, or you could consider that you can get a vasectomy at Planned Parenthood for less than the cost of a Bugaboo Cameleon stroller.”
And why not? It’s a fast procedure, and one known to be reversible. Sort of. Eighty percent of the time, reversing a vasectomy restores fertility, but it has been found that waiting 15 years or more to have a vasectomy reversed leads to a significant drop in success rate. What doctors tell men who go in – that they had better consider their infertility permanent – is no joke, especially for younger men who choose to have it done as a means of preventing pregnancy scares then they’re not ready to have a family.
So why aren’t more people elated to hear about RISUG, a fully reversible, 100 percent effective, one-time procedure that injects a substance into the vas deferens that makes sperm incapable of fertilizing an
