male birth control

Heart-Stopping Arrow Poison Could Be the Key to Male Birth Control

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A non-toxic version of the compound interrupts fertilization in rats

 

Will blue packets replace pink ones soon?

Will blue packets replace pink ones soon?

After decades of research, development of a male birth control may now be one step closer. My colleagues and I are working on a promising lead for a male birth control pill based on ouabain – a plant extract that African warriors and hunters traditionally used as a heart-stopping poison on their arrows.

Hunters want ouabain to be deadly
Hunters want ouabain to be deadly when used on an arrow, but no one wants a fatal contraceptive.

While the birth control pill has been available to women in the United States for nearly six decades – and FDA-approved for contraceptive use since 1960 – an oral contraceptive for men has not yet come to market. The pill has provided women with safe, effective and reversible options for birth control, while options for men have been stuck in a rut.

Today, men have just two choices when it comes to birth control: condoms or a vasectomy. Together, these two methods account for just 30 percent of contraception used, leaving the remaining 70 percent of contraceptive methods to women. An estimated 500,000 American men opt for a vasectomy each year – a small number given the need for contraception. Vasectomy is an invasive procedure to do that’s also difficult and invasive to reverse.

When it comes to birth control options for men, the need is clear. Unplanned pregnancy rates remain high across the globe. It’s time for more options.

Researchers are exploring both hormonal and nonhormonal options for male birth control pills. Current hormonal agents under study involve the sex steroids progestins and testosterone.

While the male hormonal birth control pill option is in clinical human trials and likely closer to market, it has several potential side effects: In addition to potentially causing weight gain and changes in libido, it has the ability to lower the levels of good cholesterol (HDL-C) in men, which could negatively affect the heart health of users. The long-term effects of using hormones for male oral contraception are unknown, and it will likely be decades before this information is available.

Here at the University of Minnesota, my colleagues and I have focused on nonhormonal contraception methods that work by targeting sperm motility – biology-speak for the sperms’ ability to move or swim effectively. Good motility is a necessary condition for fertilizing a female egg.

In collaboration with Gustavo Blanco at the University of Kansas, we’ve homed in on ouabain: a toxic substance produced by two types of African plants. Mammals also produce ouabain in their bodies, though at lower nonlethal levels that scientists think can help control blood pressure. In fact, physicians have used ouabain in very small doses to treat patients with heart arrhythmias or suffering from heart attacks.

 

A cross-section of a cell membrane

A cross-section of a cell membrane shows how pumps made of protein subunits move sodium and potassium ions in and out of the cell. 

 

Researchers know that ouabain disrupts the passage of sodium and potassium ions through cell membranes; it interferes with the proper function of proteins that transport the ions in and out of cells. Some of the ion-transporting protein subunits targeted by ouabain are found in cardiac tissue – its ability to disrupt proper heart function is what makes ouabain a deadly poison. But ouabain also affects another type of transporter subunit called α4, which is found only in sperm cells. This protein is known to be critical in fertility — at least in male mice.

For 10 years, my colleagues and I have been studying ouabain as a potential breakthrough in our quest for a male birth control pill. However, ouabain by itself isn’t an option as a contraceptive because of the risk of heart damage. So we set out to design ouabain analogs – versions of the molecule that are more likely to bind to the α4 protein in sperm than other subunits in heart tissue.

In the lab, we used the techniques of medicinal chemistry to create a derivative of ouabain that is good at zeroing in on the α4 transporter in sperm cells in rats. Once bound to those cells, it interferes with the sperms’ ability to swim – essential to its role in fertilizing an egg. Our new compound showed no toxicity in rats.

Because the α4 transporter is found only on mature sperm cells, the contraceptive effect should be reversible – sperm cells produced after stopping the treatment presumably won’t be affected. Ouabain may also offer men a birth control pill option with fewer systemic side effects than hormonal options.

Our results are promising because our candidate molecule, unlike ouabain, is nontoxic in rats. Our modification is a big step forward in the process of developing a nonhormonal male birth control pill. But there’s a lot left to do before men can buy this contraceptive at the pharmacy.

After our ouabain analog showed promise in rat studies at reducing sperm motility, future studies will focus on the effectiveness of our lead compound as an actual contraceptive in animals. We need to prove that a reduction in sperm movement translates into a drop in egg fertilization.

Then, we’ll begin the standard steps in drug discovery such as toxicology and safety pharmacology studies as we advance toward planning and conducting clinical trials. Our team is already taking the next step to test our compound in animal mating trials. If things continue as planned, we hope to get to human clinical trials within five years.

Reversible, effective male birth control is within sight. World Health Organization numbers suggest that reducing sperm motility by 50 percent or less is sufficient to temporarily make a man infertile. Our ongoing research brings us one step closer to expanding the options for male birth control, providing the world’s 7.6 billion people with a much-needed option for safe and reversible contraception.

Male Birth Control, Without Condoms, Will Be Here by 2017.

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Vasalgel, a reversible, non-hormonal polymer that blocks the vas deferens, is about to enter human trials. How will rhetoric change when male bodies become responsible for birth control?

Vasalgel, a reversible form of male birth control, just took one step closer to your vas deferens.
According to a press release from the Parsemus Foundation, a not-for profit organization focused on developing low-cost medical approaches, Vasalgel is proving effective in a baboon study. Three lucky male baboons were injected with Vasalgel and given unrestricted sexual access to 10 to 15 female baboons each. Despite the fact that they have been monkeying around for six months now, no female baboons have been impregnated. With the success of this animal study and new funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Parsemus Foundation is planning to start human trials for Vasalgel next year. According to their FAQ page, they hope to see it on the market by 2017 for, in their words, less than the cost of a flat-screen television.
So how does Vasalgel work? It is essentially a reimagining of a medical technology called RISUG (reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance) that was developed by a doctor named Sujoy Guha over 15 years ago in India, where it has been in clinical trials ever since. Unlike most forms of female birth control, Vasalgel is non-hormonal and only requires a single treatment in order to be effective for an extended period of time. Rather than cutting the vas deferens—as would be done in a vasectomy—a Vasalgel procedure involves the injection of a polymer contraceptive directly into the vas deferens. This polymer will then block any sperm that attempt to pass through the tube. At any point, however, the polymer can be flushed out with a second injection if a man wishes to bring his sperm back up to speed.

The Parsemus Foundation’s messaging on Vasalgel has focused on making the technology appealing to men. In a New York Times op-ed published this year, Elaine Lissner of the Parsemus Foundation pitches the product to “a 20-something or 30-something man, out on the dating market” who is worried about the effectiveness of the pill, given how many women forget to take pills during any given cycle. This pitch, too, is a plea for help. The Parsemus Foundation has to rely on donations and crowdfunding in order to bring male birth control to the market. Long-term treatments like Vasalgel are much less appealing to potential funders in the pharmaceutical industry who, as they observe, would much rather “sell pills to men’s partners every month.” Why sell a flat-screen television to a man, after all, when you can rent one to a woman for a decade?
In other words, the medical industry’s investment in the multibillion-dollar female birth control industry might block men’s access to male birth control just as effectively as Vasalgel would block their sperm. But a contraceptive polymer like Vasalgel would be a major medical innovation for more than just the man about town looking to copulate without consequence. In fact, male birth control could be the next major medical advance in women’s health, as strange as that idea seems.
If the use of polymer contraceptives were to become widespread, male birth control would completely transform the ways in which we understand sexual and reproductive health. Ever since men started wrapping animal intestines around their penises hundreds of years ago, we have been approaching birth control as a way of temporarily preventing fertilization inside a woman’s body. But what if we haven’t been able to see the forest through the ovaries? What if we could use polymer contraceptives like Vasalgel to block sperm at the source, rather than implementing expensive, convoluted, and potentially harmful contraceptive countermeasures inside women’s bodies?
If Vasalgel were to become as widespread and inexpensive as the Parsemus Foundation expects, unintended pregnancies could be substantially reduced. According to the Center for Disease Control, nearly half of pregnancies in the United States are unintended. That figure rises to 80 percent of all pregnancies among women age 19 and younger, and to 90 percent below age 15. The physical, financial, and emotional toll of an unintended pregnancy can be immense. As a report from the Guttmacher Institute notes, the average cost of an abortion is $485, which “pose[s] a major financial burden for women seeking these services,” who are often lower income. Not all unintended pregnancies are unwanted, however, and given the fact that modern birth control has deep roots in Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s belief in eugenics, the benefits of male birth control for lower-income families in particular should not be overemphasized.
Even if we set the prevention of unintended pregnancies aside, however, the potentially deleterious side effects of female birth control are enough to justify the implementation of Vasalgel on their own. As WomensHealth.Gov notes, side effects of the birth control pill include an increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, blood clots, nausea, irregular bleeding, and depression. Less common methods of contraception like diaphragms and sponges can cause the rare and life-threatening toxic shock syndrome (TSS). Injections like Depo-Provera can cause bone loss and the use of intrauterine devices (IUDs) can potentially cause rips or tears in the uterus itself. It would take a commercial announcer a full minute of speed-reading to list off all the risks of every form of female birth control. Interrupting ovulation and fertilization is a complex process that requires a degree of hormonal regulation, often impacting other areas of a woman’s health.
But as luck would have it, you don’t have to tamper with testosterone in order to block sperm. It might seem as if men are unstoppable sperm machines, especially given the fact they produce 1,500 of them per second. But because sperm are as fickle as they are plentiful, technologies like Vasalgel and RISUG need not interfere with the production of sperm itself in the same way that female birth control often interferes with ovulation. Like the Little Dutch Boy walking by a dike on the brink of bursting, Vasalgel can simply plug up the vas deferens and stop an entire sea of sperm from crashing through. It promises to be a parsimonious solution to the age-old problem of preventing unwanted pregnancies. This is nothing short of Occam’s razor for your testicles.

While the way Vasalgel works inside a man’s body might be simple, its cultural impact would be complex. The Religious Right, in particular, has grown accustomed to a world in which regulating access to birth control means regulating women’s bodies, rather than men’s bodies. Although the Affordable Care Act began offering women no-to-low-cost contraceptive coverage in 2010, the Supreme Court’s now-infamous Hobby Lobby ruling this summer allowed “closely-held corporations” to offer health insurance plans without contraceptive coverage. The Hobby Lobby ruling is already being used to try to undermine Obamacare’s contraceptive requirement altogether. This week, Missouri state Representative Paul Wieland’s lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services went to the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court will consider whether or not it is constitutional for “closely-held corporations” to be able to opt out of contraceptive coverage while states like Missouri cannot.
Lost in all of this legal conflict, however, is the fact that Hobby Lobby, of course, still covers vasectomies. But what if vasectomies were cheap, non-invasive, fully reversible, and as widespread as the female birth control pill? Would businesses like Hobby Lobby begin to object to them? If Vasalgel became popular and affordable enough to surpass female birth control, it would put the Religious Right’s opposition to contraception to the test. As The New York Times reported in 2012, many on the Religious Right justify their opposition to some forms of birth control by equating them with abortion because they “prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus.” But if men’s bodies became the primary site for birth control, would religious leaders shift their rhetoric and take issue with a technology like Vasalgel on the grounds that it prevents life on a massive scale? Or do debates about life only have meaning when they take place over women’s bodies?
If the Parsemus Foundation’s optimistic timeline for the release of Vasalgel holds true, we may be forced to confront these questions sooner than expected. In the meantime, men, prepare for the possibility that you may soon take over primary responsibility for contraception from your wife or girlfriend. The future of birth control is coming and soon it might be inside of you.

Male Birth Control, Without Condoms, Will Be Here by 2017 .

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Vasalgel, a reversible, non-hormonal polymer that blocks the vas deferens, is about to enter human trials. How will rhetoric change when male bodies become responsible for birth control?
Vasalgel, a reversible form of male birth control, just took one step closer to your vas deferens.

According to a press release from the Parsemus Foundation, a not-for profit organization focused on developing low-cost medical approaches, Vasalgel is proving effective in a baboon study. Three lucky male baboons were injected with Vasalgel and given unrestricted sexual access to 10 to 15 female baboons each. Despite the fact that they have been monkeying around for six months now, no female baboons have been impregnated. With the success of this animal study and new funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Parsemus Foundation is planning to start human trials for Vasalgel next year. According to their FAQ page, they hope to see it on the market by 2017 for, in their words, less than the cost of a flat-screen television.

So how does Vasalgel work? It is essentially a reimagining of a medical technology called RISUG (reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance) that was developed by a doctor named Sujoy Guha over 15 years ago in India, where it has been in clinical trials ever since. Unlike most forms of female birth control, Vasalgel is non-hormonal and only requires a single treatment in order to be effective for an extended period of time. Rather than cutting the vas deferens—as would be done in a vasectomy—a Vasalgel procedure involves the injection of a polymer contraceptive directly into the vas deferens. This polymer will then block any sperm that attempt to pass through the tube. At any point, however, the polymer can be flushed out with a second injection if a man wishes to bring his sperm back up to speed.

Unlike most forms of female birth control, Vasalgel is non-hormonal and only requires a single treatment in order to be effective for an extended period of time.
The Parsemus Foundation’s messaging on Vasalgel has focused on making the technology appealing to men. In a New York Times op-ed published this year, Elaine Lissner of the Parsemus Foundation pitches the product to “a 20-something or 30-something man, out on the dating market” who is worried about the effectiveness of the pill, given how many women forget to take pills during any given cycle. This pitch, too, is a plea for help. The Parsemus Foundation has to rely on donations and crowdfunding in order to bring male birth control to the market. Long-term treatments like Vasalgel are much less appealing to potential funders in the pharmaceutical industry who, as they observe, would much rather “sell pills to men’s partners every month.” Why sell a flat-screen television to a man, after all, when you can rent one to a woman for a decade?

In other words, the medical industry’s investment in the multibillion-dollar female birth control industry might block men’s access to male birth control just as effectively as Vasalgel would block their sperm. But a contraceptive polymer like Vasalgel would be a major medical innovation for more than just the man about town looking to copulate without consequence. In fact, male birth control could be the next major medical advance in women’s health, as strange as that idea seems.

If the use of polymer contraceptives were to become widespread, male birth control would completely transform the ways in which we understand sexual and reproductive health. Ever since men started wrapping animal intestines around their penises hundreds of years ago, we have been approaching birth control as a way of temporarily preventing fertilization inside a woman’s body. But what if we haven’t been able to see the forest through the ovaries? What if we could use polymer contraceptives like Vasalgel to block sperm at the source, rather than implementing expensive, convoluted, and potentially harmful contraceptive countermeasures inside women’s bodies?
If Vasalgel were to become as widespread and inexpensive as the Parsemus Foundation expects, unintended pregnancies could be substantially reduced. According to the Center for Disease Control, nearly half of pregnancies in the United States are unintended. That figure rises to 80 percent of all pregnancies among women age 19 and younger, and to 90 percent below age 15. The physical, financial, and emotional toll of an unintended pregnancy can be immense. As a report from the Guttmacher Institute notes, the average cost of an abortion is $485, which “pose[s] a major financial burden for women seeking these services,” who are often lower income. Not all unintended pregnancies are unwanted, however, and given the fact that modern birth control has deep roots in Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s belief in eugenics, the benefits of male birth control for lower-income families in particular should not be overemphasized.

Even if we set the prevention of unintended pregnancies aside, however, the potentially deleterious side effects of female birth control are enough to justify the implementation of Vasalgel on their own. As WomensHealth.Gov notes, side effects of the birth control pill include an increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, blood clots, nausea, irregular bleeding, and depression. Less common methods of contraception like diaphragms and sponges can cause the rare and life-threatening toxic shock syndrome (TSS). Injections like Depo-Provera can cause bone loss and the use of intrauterine devices (IUDs) can potentially cause rips or tears in the uterus itself. It would take a commercial announcer a full minute of speed-reading to list off all the risks of every form of female birth control. Interrupting ovulation and fertilization is a complex process that requires a degree of hormonal regulation, often impacting other areas of a woman’s health.

What if we could use polymer contraceptives like Vasalgel to block sperm at the source, rather than implementing expensive and potentially harmful contraception inside women’s bodies?
But as luck would have it, you don’t have to tamper with testosterone in order to block sperm. It might seem as if men are unstoppable sperm machines, especially given the fact they produce 1,500 of them per second. But because sperm are as fickle as they are plentiful, technologies like Vasalgel and RISUG need not interfere with the production of sperm itself in the same way that female birth control often interferes with ovulation. Like the Little Dutch Boy walking by a dike on the brink of bursting, Vasalgel can simply plug up the vas deferens and stop an entire sea of sperm from crashing through. It promises to be a parsimonious solution to the age-old problem of preventing unwanted pregnancies. This is nothing short of Occam’s razor for your testicles.

While the way Vasalgel works inside a man’s body might be simple, its cultural impact would be complex. The Religious Right, in particular, has grown accustomed to a world in which regulating access to birth control means regulating women’s bodies, rather than men’s bodies. Although the Affordable Care Act began offering women no-to-low-cost contraceptive coverage in 2010, the Supreme Court’s now-infamous Hobby Lobby ruling this summer allowed “closely-held corporations” to offer health insurance plans without contraceptive coverage. The Hobby Lobby ruling is already being used to try to undermine Obamacare’s contraceptive requirement altogether. This week, Missouri state Representative Paul Wieland’s lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services went to the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court will consider whether or not it is constitutional for “closely-held corporations” to be able to opt out of contraceptive coverage while states like Missouri cannot.

If Vasalgel became popular and affordable enough to surpass female birth control, it would put the Religious Right’s opposition to contraception to the test.
Lost in all of this legal conflict, however, is the fact that Hobby Lobby, of course, still covers vasectomies. But what if vasectomies were cheap, non-invasive, fully reversible, and as widespread as the female birth control pill? Would businesses like Hobby Lobby begin to object to them? If Vasalgel became popular and affordable enough to surpass female birth control, it would put the Religious Right’s opposition to contraception to the test. As The New York Times reported in 2012, many on the Religious Right justify their opposition to some forms of birth control by equating them with abortion because they “prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus.” But if men’s bodies became the primary site for birth control, would religious leaders shift their rhetoric and take issue with a technology like Vasalgel on the grounds that it prevents life on a massive scale? Or do debates about life only have meaning when they take place over women’s bodies?

If the Parsemus Foundation’s optimistic timeline for the release of Vasalgel holds true, we may be forced to confront these questions sooner than expected. In the meantime, men, prepare for the possibility that you may soon take over primary responsibility for contraception from your wife or girlfriend. The future of birth control is coming and soon it might be inside of you.

Why male birth control is a million disasters waiting to happen.

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It was 100 degrees out but I couldn’t stop shivering. I wore two shirts, jeans, and a heavy hoody but was still colder than I had ever been in my life.

Several months prior to the chills I started to have trouble sleeping. The urge to urinate woke me up about every two hours. I woke up about four times a night to take a piss. Each time hardly anything would actually come out.

At first I wrote it off.

Maybe I’m drinking too much water before bed, I thought. After all, I did drink tons of water throughout the day.

Then I started having problems urinating during the day. I’d whip it out to piss and then…nothing. Sometimes it’d be a full minute until I could actually get a stream going.

The pain started a few weeks later. It felt like a burning-hot screwdriver was being shoved up my phallus every time I tried to pee. There was pain even when I didn’t go to the bathroom. The sensation was as if everything beneath my stomach was crammed into a blender, torn apart, and then lit on fire. There was also pain in my sides. I don’t have quite as dramatic an explanation for that pain. If you’ve ever been punched before, imagine that but coming from the inside.

Regular visits to the gynecologist are essentially a must for a woman. While this has to suck, the upshot is that it forces them to understand their sexual health and reproductive health better than any man understands their own. It also, presumably, makes them less afraid of invasive tests since they have to endure them on a semi-regular basis. That’s why I put off going to the urologist for so long, because I was afraid of getting a tube put in my dick. Eventually, I couldn’t stand the pain and constant chills anymore, and I saw the doctor.

The doctor said I had a severe bacterial kidney infection that spread to the bladder and prostate—so basically a kidney infection, a urinary tract infection, and prostatitis.

I took the most powerful antibiotics they’re allowed to prescribe and after a while the pain went away…but the nocturia (getting up to pee a lot during the night) and the long delay before urinating. I went back to the doctor and he said the bladder muscle had become spastic and overactive as a result of the prolonged infection.

He prescribed a medicine to help me with my symptoms. I can’t remember the name, but I know it belonged to a class of medicines calledAlpha Blockers.

“One thing about this medicine,” the doctor said as he typed the prescription into the computer. “There’s a chance it can cause retrograde ejaculation.”

“Um…what?” I asked. I obviously knew what ejaculation meant but “retrograde” could’ve meant anything.

“Dry orgasms. No seminal fluid,” he said. In more specific terms, retrograde ejaculation is when semen gets sent into the bladder rather than out into a sock, condom, or, if you’re lucky, a crevasse belonging to your significant other.

I was weirded out but he said there was only a chance, right? So that meant there was a chance it didn’t cause retrograde ejaculation.

This pathetic bit of self delusion lasted until my first jerk-off session on the medicine. I felt the familiar build-up of pleasure and tension (I call it plension) and then… nothing. Not only was there no semen, there was no electric rush, no hip-bucking, and no release.

After about a month of this, I asked to switch to a different medicine. As far as I knew, that’d be the last time I’d ever have to think or hear about dry orgasms and retrograde ejaculation.

I was wrong.

Male birth control is swift becoming a highly discussed issue among social justice circles and the Internet in general.

One proposed method of male birth control is the use of alpha blockers to intentionally cause dry orgasms. Another, more recently publicizedstrategy is using gel to block the vas deferens—the tube sperm travels through—thereby preventing sperm from ever coming out of the penis (forgive the pun). The latter product could be available in three years.

The Daily Beast’s Samantha Allen, who is also a frequent contributor at the Daily Dot, noted that male birth control could have a multitude of wondrous impacts on society, and would greatly aid women since they would no longer be subject to the deleterious affects of The Pill.

Allen’s interpretation of the facts is accurate, but it paints too rosy a picture. The coming wave of male birth control will make conversations about reproductive health more vitriolic and hateful, not less.

First, insertion of gel into the vas deferens is an invasive procedure—far more invasive than popping a pill every day. A significant percentage of America’s 150 million-plus men will not go for it no matter how economical it is or how beneficial to society it is. American culture is too patriarchal and while #NotAllMen are this selfish, most are.

The bigger concern, however, isn’t the procedure but the dry orgasm.

“Dry orgasm” is a misnomer. Yeah it’s dry, but calling it an orgasm is just wrong. My dry “orgasms” felt like being 12 again—old enough to get a boner looking at porn illegally downloaded from Napster but not actually old enough for your member to spew forth any precious fluids.

I’m not alone in realizing that dry orgasms remove pleasure from sex. Astudy performed in 2009 found that “a strong decline in ejaculatory volume is associated with reduced sexual pleasure” when they gave men alpha blockers. The study noted the men were “greatly dissatisfied with the ejaculatory dysfunction” from the alpha blockers.

I lost all sex drive almost immediately once I started having dry orgasms. I didn’t even respond to a “booty call” I got while I was on the alpha blockers because I just didn’t care. What was the point of having sex if I knew I was incapable of enjoying it?

Cynics and jokesters would say “Well, if male birth control reduces libido then mission accomplished: No kids!”

Birth control isn’t just a preventative measure; it enables people to fully enjoy sex while avoiding the grave biological and financial consequences of sex. Male birth control, however, prevents pleasure as well as pregnancy.

Look, I’m not a men’s rights activist. I’m not trying to say women should be subjugated and forced to take the pill for as long as they live. I’m just saying that male birth control is highly imperfect. If you’re expecting it to take the world by storm in 2017, don’t. Once the first crop of men feel what a dry orgasm is like, it’ll start a new culture war. Imagine the GIF vs. JIF debate, but 10,000 times worse because it’ll be filled with more hate and it’ll be an issue that actually matters.

I guarantee you there will be a contingent of men comparing male birth control to female circumcision in that it robs both groups of pleasure. The web will be inundated with articles just like this one explaining just how awful male birth control is for men’s sexual health. And maybe we don’t deserve sexual health for all the atrocities we’ve committed against females, but good luck convincing America of that.

This birth control innovation isn’t a solution, it’s 150 million problems waiting to happen.