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New Male Birth Control Pill Effectively Prevents Pregnancy Without Side Effects

scitechdaily.com

11–20 of 173 posts

Re: New Male Birth Control Pill Effectively Prevents Pregnancy Without Side Effects

#11
post #4

In Western countries and in Asia, fertility rates are pretty (edit: low) these days. I fear they would collapse with the introduction of a male fertility pill. In some sense, maybe that's not bad. The world is probably overpopulated. But if fertility drops too fast it creates real demographics problems in that few young people need to support many old people.

Why? That would only be the case if a significant number of pregnancies is unwanted.

We should do everything to stop any unwanted pregnancies, and then add incentives and aid for everybody who wants to have kids (e.g. parental leave, free daycare, and so on).

Re: New Male Birth Control Pill Effectively Prevents Pregnancy Without Side Effects

#12
post #4

In Western countries and in Asia, fertility rates are pretty (edit: low) these days. I fear they would collapse with the introduction of a male fertility pill. In some sense, maybe that's not bad. The world is probably overpopulated. But if fertility drops too fast it creates real demographics problems in that few young people need to support many old people.

Oral contraceptives are not as comfortable and easy to use as condoms, which are available everywhere. Taking drugs just to avoid pregnacy would be an alternative probably for people in relationships (instead of sometimes problematic womens contraceptives) and for people doing a lot of casual sex (who probably already use condoms/woman are on hormonal contraception).

Re: New Male Birth Control Pill Effectively Prevents Pregnancy Without Side Effects

#13
post #4

In Western countries and in Asia, fertility rates are pretty (edit: low) these days. I fear they would collapse with the introduction of a male fertility pill. In some sense, maybe that's not bad. The world is probably overpopulated. But if fertility drops too fast it creates real demographics problems in that few young people need to support many old people.

We shouldn’t rely on unplanned pregnancies for the birth rates. There are other strategies.

Re: New Male Birth Control Pill Effectively Prevents Pregnancy Without Side Effects

#18
post #2

I feel like there's a male birth control on the horizon every year for the last ten years. This one hasn't hit human trials yet so no point getting excited.

There is Trestolone which is studied and shown to be very effective (patients had zero sperm in their ejaculate after several months of administering the compound), but there are hormonal side effects similar to testosterone, which kind of explains why it's pretty much only used in the bodybuilding community. The pill in the article is a non-hormonal one, which is interesting

Vasalgel (a reversible injection that prevents your swimmers from making it into the sauce) is another interesting one that has never made it to release for perplexing reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm...

Re: New Male Birth Control Pill Effectively Prevents Pregnancy Without Side Effects

#19
post #15

Interesting that they don’t mention vasalgel.

Probably because I've been hearing about it for a decade and it's gone nowhere?

Conspiracy whatever, given the normal effects of vasectony (sensitization of the immune system to sperm) I suspect that's been the problem with it.

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