Sperm-Stoppers - The Search For A Male Contraceptive Pill

For over half a century, women have been able to take control of their bodies to prevent pregnancies. But many men now want to share this responsibility with their partners. So how long will they be waiting for a male pill?

- Dr Kat Arney

More than 50 years ago, in 1960, the first female hormonal contraceptive pill, Enovid, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), with the UK following in 1961. Just five years later, millions of pills were being popped around the world every day as women took control of their reproductive choices and health, creating a seismic change in society. Today, women have a wide range of reliable, reversible options for controlling their fertility, including intrauterine devices (IUDs), patches, jabs and implants. Men have just two: condoms, which have a 15% failure rate under real-life conditions and are disliked by many couples, and vasectomy – cutting the tubes that shuttle sperm from the testes to the penis. And although vasectomy reversal is possible, it doesn’t always work. So why don’t we have a male pill?

The history of the male contraceptive pill has been a lot more up and down than the female pill. Its origins date back to the 1950s, when US biologist Gregory Pincus, one of the co-inventors of the female pill, found that doses of a synthetic version of the male sex hormone testosterone could switch off sperm production in the same way that the female hormones in the pill shut down ovulation.

“The physiology and science behind the male hormonal contraceptive pill is analogous to the female pill,” explains Prof Stephanie Page, an expert in male reproductive biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Giving men an external source of testosterone blocks their own production of the hormone in organs like the testes. They still have plenty of it in their blood, so it doesn’t affect the rest of their body, but developing sperm need 100 to 1,000 times as much testosterone for their final maturation and there just isn’t enough in the testes to enable them to finish developing.”

Sperm-stopper