The pill, the IUD, the patch – for most part, when it comes to family planning and preventing pregnancies from happening, certainly in more long-term relationships, the responsibility most often falls on women.
However, this could all be about to change apparently, with a new birth control for men—a topical gel called NES/T—entering phase two of clinical trials in the US.
How does it work?
The gel is applied to a man’s arms and shoulders daily (which sounds a lot less invasive than some current birth control methods for women), and this will lower sperm count.
Christina Wang is a researcher at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute and principal investigator of the trial. Her team has been working on this stuff for almost 10 years, Gizmodo reports. “We’ve had over 200 men exposed to the medication, and we’ve never had any serious adverse events,” she told Gizmodo. “But we will be monitoring everything very closely.”
Stephanie Page, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington, told Quartz she hopes to see more male birth control options follow the gel.
A common argument against male birth control is that men will never buy into the responsibility, but Page believes if men had more choices, they would. “If we want men to be engaged in contraception, we really need to have a menu of options for men like we do for women,” Page said.
The good news is that a male birth control like this could be a game changer for women who can’t use conventional hormonal birth control methods, and unlike a vasectomy, it’s completely reversible.
The bad news? We are still a while off this being stocked at your local pharmacy, mums, but at least it is promising that some of the family planning responsibility could be shared more fairly in the future.
