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Male contraceptives: why not?

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

We’ve become used to seeing contraceptive solutions for women — there are no widely-used ingested male contraceptives. Though condoms are largely seen as a ‘male’ contraceptive, I think most reasonable people can see that they are equally as inconvenient for women. ’Are You Using Anything?’ (AlterNet) talks about a new “Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance”, an injectable contraceptive for men “developed by professor Sujoy K. Guha, an Indian researcher of biomedical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology”. Even though you may have never heard of him or his drug, he has been testing it on men “for more than 25 years”:

“The entire procedure is virtually painless and becomes effective within one hour of injection. There are no known side effects, aside from slight swelling immediately after the injection. Guha reports some of his test subjects were sexually active on the same day they received the injection. None of the men who has tested RISUG has gotten a woman pregnant.”

You may be thinking, “Sounds great, where/when can I get it?”. If you live in the States or Canada, the answer is nowhere/never. Even though it’s completely reversible, “renders a man infertile for six to 15 years”, has never failed in 25 years of testing and has no side-effects, there is a big problem with it: it’s too cheap.

Hardcore, free-market countries always use their free markets to allow corporations to offer products to consumers, allowing the best, most desired product to freely evolve from those consumers’ needs and desires. Therefore, if you’re wrongheaded (read: communist or terrorist) enough to think some things should simply be provided by the government, you’re wrong.

If health care is best provided by corporations savagely competing with one another to give you the best care for the best price (this level of sarcasm is getting difficult to maintain, even for me), then contraception more so. The fact that a large portion of the country would benefit immensely from non-invasive, non-hormonal, non-forgettable birth control doesn’t enter into it: all (legal) drugs in a truly advanced society must be profitable to the purveyor.

Now that we have the ground rules of the society we live in established, anyone can see what the problem is. Let’s use the US as an example: the FDA approval process costs “ $20 million to $70 million” and “10-15 years”. No corporation is going to push a drug through this process in order to be able to sell one dose per male every 6 to 15 years.

See how that works?

So, even though ‘The Pill’ involves hormones, pharmaceutical companies continue to pour money into their development, because they must be taken every day and involve good, solid, old-fashioned, repeat business.

“In the Western world, men will soon have the option of controlling their fertility with hormones. Weiss says he guesses the male pill will be on the market in five to 10 years.”

So, whereas “men in parts of the developing world may be able to use [RISUG]”, getting a single (until now) failsafe injection, Western men will get to bloat, experience mood swings and other wonderful side-effects as they take a pill every day.

So, if you’re tired of having your choices limited, or don’t relish the thought of being laughed at by the rest of the world (excluding Europe and Canada, this time :-), book a trip to India in the next couple of years and stop by a local clinic.