Male Oral Contraceptive Pill is on the Way.

Process of fertilization. Image credit to The Telegraph

There are approximately 7 billion people on the planet currently and close to half of this number live in abject poverty. Coupled with this is the fact that these people living in poverty are most likely to give birth to more children, far more than they can train with the little resources at their disposal.

On the other hand, even some fractions of the enlightened segment of the world population in especially developing parts of the world still have mixed reaction towards the need for family planning. There are so many reasons behind this. Among them is the view held by some religious sects concerning the use of contraceptives; there is also the issue of the unwanted side effects of the various oral, injectable and implantable contraceptives used by married women, one of which is excessive weight gain (women are very concerned when it comes to their weight and I fully support them in that); some married men are not willing to use the Durex as they believe it reduces the pleasure that is derived from sex; and when it comes to the permanent contraceptive option, bilateral tubal ligation (the two Fallopian tubes of the uterus are surgically sectioned in the woman) and vasectomy (the man's vas deferens which transport sperm from the testes to the prostate gland is sectioned surgically), it has been shown that the married woman is more likely to go for it, the bilateral tubal ligation.

This is very unlike the man, especially here in Africa, who believes that one of the major attributes of a man is his ability to impregnate a woman-and hence that special characteristic must not be taken away (this is somehow selfish but I'm indifferent on it anyway).

Since there are very few contraceptive options outside this for men--condoms, withdrawal and the rhythm method-- all of which are most likely to be unpalatable to a greater percentage of married men, people in the medical field have been musing over the possibility of a method that will not take away permanently the man's ability to impregnate a woman; that will still allow him to get the full pleasure of sex; but which will prevent him for that moment from getting his wife pregnant.

Feasibility of a male contraceptive pill. Image credit to The Royal Society of Chemistry.

And it looks like this particular idea may be brought to reality in the foreseeable future. A new study by researchers in Australia and published on the 4th of November, 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America shows that it is possible to reversibly prevent sperm from getting into the ejaculate during sex. Though the research was carried out using animals, mice, the prospect of reproducing such in humans is very high. In the study, the scientist used a technique called gene knockout to delete the two genes in mice that encode two proteins responsible for the transport of sperm from the vas deferens to the prostate gland during the emission phase of ejaculation so that the ejaculate produced by these mice contained no spermatozoa, and hence could not fertilize the females. Also, the researchers checked for side effects of this method and found there was mild reduction in blood pressure and heart rate because the two proteins have roles in blood pressure control through the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system.

The researchers are now shifting their attention towards achieving that in humans, not by gene knockout anyway, but through the development of drugs that can reversibly bind on the active sites of the human version of these two sperm-transporting proteins; however, this is going take some time according to the researchers. Nevertheless, what matters most is that a safe, viable target for contraceptive pill development has been found; safe and viable in the sense that, unlike other previous attempts at developing drugs to prevent a man from temporarily producing sperm and in the pills for women, this particular modality does not target spermatogenesis (sperm development) and the hormonal regulations guiding it which could lead to untold mutations that can have future impact if the man decides to have more children. And one more good thing about this research is that when the drugs are finally developed they will likely be in form of tablets that can be taken with a glass of water. It would work as long as it is being taken; once the man stops taking it, he can reverse to being able to get his wife pregnant.

Family planning and birth control, to me and how it should be viewed, is giving birth to the number of children a couple can comfortably raise with the resources available to them; spacing the birth of these children to allow for the full recuperation of the mother after each child--and this is extremely important for the health of both the nursing mother and the child being nursed.