“Don’t worry baby, I’m on the pill.”
As a woman, I’ve said many versions of this line before, but if I ever heard it myself, I think I would laugh out loud – or cry.
The idea of a male contraceptive pill possibly appearing on the market in the next few years is more worrisome than revolutionary.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find that I can’t even trust guys I date to remember my birthday, let alone take on responsibility for my reproductive system.
I think the only way I’d ever rely on my boyfriend taking the pill is if I physically administered it to him myself every day.
Now don’t get me wrong – I’m sure that there are certain men in long-term monogamous relationships that wouldn’t mind taking a little pink pill every day. It would be an alternative to the woman having to take the pill for years without any break from it, and would certainly be less painful or permanent than a vasectomy.
What I’m worried about are all the other men – the unmarried, uncommitted, casual daters who can walk away from a situation if an accident happens because they forgot to take their birth control, or just lied about taking it altogether. Never mind the large increase in STIs and AIDS that would probably arise from the inevitable decrease in condom use.
Research into the potential of developing a hormonal or pharmaceutical contraception for men has been going on for decades, but the latest development comes from a study at the University of California.
Scientists have found a new sex hormone in the human brain that could put us one step closer to having the male pill as a birth control option.
But, study co-author George Bentley, a biologist at the university, says there is still a lot they don’t know about this new hormone and how it affects the human body, so the pill might still be a long way off.
One reason why the pill is taking so long to develop is because women and men’s reproductive systems are very different.
Men are fertile all the time, whereas women are fertile only once a month. To achieve birth control for a woman, the pill only needs to block one egg per month, but for men, it would have to essentially shut down production of roughly a million sperm every day.
It’s also worth considering that taking a pill to become infertile might bruise the fragile male ego a little.
“For men in our culture, fertility is often equated with virility,” says Christabelle Sethna, a women’s studies professor at the University of Ottawa.
I admit, in an ideal world, the male pill would be nice in that it would provide a method of birth control that wasn’t female dependant, like the majority are in today’s society.
Since the pill emerged in the 1960s, every new form of birth control that has emerged thereafter has been female dependent.
However, the reason why feminists fought so hard to get a pill on the market in the first place was so that women could have autonomy over their bodies. Before the pill, the only methods of birth control – condoms or withdrawal – were male-reliant.
And while it is idealistic to think responsibility for birth control should be on both genders, the fact is, it’s just difficult to get around that trust issue, because ultimately, women have a lot more to lose if something goes wrong.
I can’t even remember to take my pill on time every day – and I’m the one that could potentially become pregnant.
So why would men want to pump themselves full of hormones and possibly suffer short or long term side effects if they aren’t the ones who would suffer the repercussions firsthand?
Well, frankly, I don’t think they would, and ladies, we shouldn’t expect them to, either.