Here’s a step forward for gender equality: a male birth control pill
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, it’s Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. Today’s lesson is number 458 and the producer, JR, has uploaded the full content to PlainEnglish.com/458.
Coming up today: The birth control pill has given women more freedom to plan their pregnancies. But decades after the pill’s development, it’s still women who have to take that pill every day. Now, researchers are experimenting with a birth control pill for men to take. We’ll talk about that on today’s lesson.
The English expression we’ll discuss today is “shoulder the burden,” and we have a quote of the week. This week’s lesson contains some grown-up vocabulary, so if that makes you uncomfortable, you might want to choose another lesson from our archives just for today.
A birth control pill for men enters human trials
In English, it’s known simply as, “the pill.”
When the birth control pill came out in 1960, it promised to give women much more control over when they could get pregnant. Before then, the decision to use some type of contraception always involved the man’s consent, or at least knowledge.
Women “on the pill,” as we say, take it either once every day, or for 21 out of every 28 days. Either way , the pill contains hormones that prevent ovulation, which is the release of an egg during the menstrual cycle.
By giving women more control over when—and whether—to get pregnant, the pill gave women more opportunities to further their education early in adulthood, to enter the workforce, and to accumulate savings before having children. The reduction in unplanned pregnancies also gave women more choice over whom to marry.
For all its benefits, though, the pill isn’t perfect. Women (at least in America) still need a doctor’s prescription. Not all women can take the pill for health reasons. And—I’m sure some of you are waiting for me to point this out—the pill comes with side effects.
Today , over sixty years after the first oral contraceptive came out, women are still the ones taking the daily pill, refilling their prescriptions, and suffering the side effects. Many people think this is a small price to pay in exchange for the freedom and opportunity that birth control provides. But in this more enlightened age, isn’t it about time that men shoulder at least some of the burden ?
That’s exactly what scientists at the University of Minnesota think, and they’ve recently developed a male contraceptive drug that has been proven to be 99 percent effective in mice, without side effects. Mice that were given the drug suffered such a steep drop in sperm count that they became sterile, meaning they could not get another mouse pregnant. After the drug was withdrawn, their sperm counts recovered within four to six weeks. The researchers recently got approval to test the drug on human subjects, and human trials will soon begin.
Success with mice does not guarantee that the drug will be effective with humans, and many previous trials have been halted or have failed. Some previous attempts at a male birth control drug have been delivered via injection, which is cumbersome. Another trial required men to spread a gel on their shoulders—again, not impossible but not as convenient as a pill either. Finally, other drugs have induced side effects that participants thought were unacceptably high.
Even so, there are reasons to be optimistic about the drug currently under consideration. Researchers identified an “effective dose” of their drug—how much would they have to give the mice for the drug to be effective? Then, they gave the mice 100 times that dose, just to see if there were any side effects. Even at 100 times the effective dose, the mice didn’t suffer any side effects and they still recovered their full virility after a few weeks.
If this drug is approved for humans, it could be an important tool for couples to use in family planning. To date, men have had only two contraceptive options: to use a condom (which sometimes fails) or to get a vasectomy, a surgery that is intended to be permanent.
With a male birth control pill, a man wouldn’t have to trust that his partner had remembered to take hers (or to use another form of contraception). It would also allow men to give their partners some relief from taking the daily pill and suffering the side effects. It can also indirectly help women, too, if it reduces unplanned pregnancies.
But would men even take the pill if one were available? There are reasons to believe they might. A survey in Britain found that eight out of sexually active men believe contraception is a shared responsibility. In the same survey, a third of men said they would consider using a hormonal contraceptive pill. The pill under consideration now doesn’t involve hormones, so presumably that percentage would increase. And a survey in the U.S. found that over three-quarters of sexually active men under the age of 44 were “very or somewhat interested” in trying out a male contraceptive other than the limited options available now.
Update on another scientific breakthrough
Speaking of scientific breakthroughs: in Lesson 416, you learned about an experimental procedure to connect a pig’s kidney to a human patient . It was the first animal-to-human transplant of a kidney. In that experimental case, the human patient was brain dead, meaning that the human would not have survived one way or another. The researchers connected the kidney just to see if it would work, without putting a patient in danger—and it worked.
After that lesson came out, doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center successfully transplanted a pig’s heart into a human patient—not a kidney, but a heart. The patient was 57 years old and was not eligible for a human heart transplant because of his other conditions. As a last-ditch effort, they tried a pig’s heart, and he lived for two months. He died in early March. But he got two more months on this Earth, two more months with his family, and it was only the first time a pig’s heart had ever been transplanted to a human. I think that’s amazing.
If you want to hear more about that original surgery, and how they got a pig’s kidney to work in a human, go to PlainEnglish.com/416 .
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