After a six-year break, I’ve recently started back on hormonal birth control. I stopped last time because of the side effects. Mainly anxiety, mood swings and a seriously low sex drive. Fun! And if you look anywhere online right now, there are plenty of people who have experienced the same thing and are starting to see hormonal birth control as more of a burden than a benefit.
Depending on which method you take, side effects might include spotting or heavy periods, changes in sex drive, depression, nausea, headaches, weight gain, mood swings, ovarian cysts, acne and even blood clots.
Despite the potential side effects, I’m still a big fan of the pill. It’s been an absolute game changer for women, allowing us to take control of our sexual and reproductive health to live more free lives. And honestly, this time I’ve deluded myself into thinking that this time will be different, and who knows, maybe it will. But it’s got me thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if my male partner could give it a go this time round?
The pill has existed since the 1950s, and now there's the rod, the injection, the hormonal IUD and the copper IUD, and yet, there is still no male alternative. Yes, they can use condoms, pull out (which leaves a lot of room for error) or get a vasectomy, which, although technically reversible in some cases, is only really an option for older men who know they don’t want kids.
But it feels like I’ve been hearing that “male birth control is just around the corner” for the last 15 years, so where the hell is it?
Research and attempts at different forms of male birth control are not new, and scientists around the world have been working on this since the 1970s. And yet, in 2026, nothing has materialised. Let’s investigate why!
To start, biologically speaking, it is harder to make an effective contraceptive for men than for women.
This is because for women, contraception only needs to stop the body from releasing one egg per month. With men, the contraceptive needs to stop millions of sperm every minute. And it takes three months to make sperm. This means contraceptives would need to be used for three months to ensure there’s no sperm in the system and prevent pregnancy reliably.
And while saying that it’s biologically more difficult (or impossible as some opponents of male birth control would like to tell you), it’s absolutely doable. And we know this because there have been multiple attempts with successful results. However, none of them have made it past the clinical trial stage so far. Even those deemed safe and effective in human clinical trials met dead ends due to undesirable side effects. The same side effects that women on the pill know all too well.
Like in 2016 during a clinical trial for a hormonal contraceptive injection, which was found to be almost 100% effective in suppressing sperm concentrations. However, many of the trial participants reported side effects. The main ones being acne, weight gain and mood changes. And these side effects stopped the trial, despite 75% of those interviewed after the study saying they would continue to use it if it were made available.
And this isn’t just the case for this study; many have failed to get beyond clinical trials because of side effects. The same side effects that are cleared for the female pill have prevented FDA approval for the male one.
This is in part because the pill was approved before strict medical ethics standards were put in place to protect participants in medical trials. The pill did undergo medical trials, but the experiments were controversial for several reasons. In a study of 1500 women in Puerto Rico, half the participants dropped out, and three women died, yet the pill was still approved. While they have made changes to it since then around safety, side effects persist.
For the male contraceptive, the safety standards for approval are much higher for two reasons. Firstly, men have stable hormone levels except for an increase of testosterone in the morning. Whereas people who menstruate already experience fluctuations in their hormone levels throughout their cycle, so it’s expected that any changes can be managed, as they should be used to it already.
And secondly, men can’t get pregnant, while women can. So for women, it’s a balance between the risk of taking hormonal birth control vs the risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth. This means that the bar for male contraceptives is significantly higher, and so far, none of the hormonal options has been able to reach it.
And even with successful trials, there’s still a double standard about the societal expectation of who this type of preventative care should sit with. And whose body is expected to handle the side effects of hormonal contraception. And this has real-world impacts on where funding goes for research.
Despite the frequent side effects, pharmaceutical companies consider the current birth control options to be fine already, so why bother with something new when women can continue being responsible for it? The female pill is low cost, readily available and has been good enough this far, right? As far as the pharmaceutical companies, that’s ticks all round!
While this hasn’t stopped the development of male birth control completely, it has certainly slowed things down.
However, the tide may be turning. A 2023 online survey of over 2000 Canadian and American men found that three-quarters of participants said they were willing to try male birth control. While that’s a relatively small sample size, it’s still a promising result!
And recently, a number of non-hormonal options have shown promise.
There’s a vaccine being researched that targets a protein involved in sperm maturation as well as an injectable that works like a vasectomy called RISUG (reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance). RISUG involves injecting a synthetic polymer into the vas deferens (the tube that carries sperm out of the testes) to block the exit of sperm. And it’s reversible with another injection to dissolve it. Human clinical trials are underway, so hopefully we will see something become available soon.
In the meantime, if you are a man and you want to take control of your fertility, use condoms and lubricant for the time being, and talk to your peers and healthcare providers about male birth control to normalise the conversation. Hell, if you are really committed, get involved in a trial if there’s one available in your area.
But for now, it seems that a male contraceptive will remain “just around the corner” for at least the next few years.
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