The unwillingness to even try to sell a male birth control because if fears about a side effect profile that matches what women can deal with is a good indicator of just how fragile the drug manufacturers think men are.
The safety equation for men and women differs vastly. The pill is acceptable at its current safety level because the alternative is pregnancy which can be lethal. Plus the various uses in cycle control, important not just for fertility but also hormone management.
For men there is no downside to not taking the contraceptive, so it must boast a much higher safety profile to be considered. As it stands, the current attempts were either much too dangerous (higher rate of adverse responses than the pill) or too permanent, nothing to do with the fragility of men - perceived or otherwise.
The pill can wreck women’s hormonal cycles. It’s hardly a given that it will “control” them.
One could also say the pill can control women's hormonal cycles. It's hardly a given that it will "wreck" them.
Thankfully the pill is one of the many female contraceptive choices.
The women's pill emulates and controls an existing hormonal cycle that naturally regulates their fertility.
There is no such natural hormonal cycle for men, that regulates their fertility.
If I saw some technical similarities between those two processes I would not oppose hormonal control pills for men, but the male and female bodies work differently.
Hormonal birth control for males exists. Usually by dropping testosterone which isn’t a great idea.
My point is not that hormonal treatments for men is advisable but that there are non trivial consequences for both genders.
> A hormonal approach for men would probably go very poorly.
I would have liked to continue a discussion, but it seems like you actually understood the problem but pretend not to, in order to troll someone.
"For men there is no downside to not taking the contraceptive," at least we're in agreement here that the entirety of the risk is placed on women, for whom requiring medication with major detrimental side effects is acceptable.
Let's be very clear though, your comparison to the health risks of being pregnant is at best irrelevant: if the parties involved are using some form of birth control it is reasonable to assume that the goal is not to have a child. In which case it is incorrect to be comparing the risk of pregnancy with the risk of hormonal birth control. The correct comparison is between hormonal (or similar) birth control, and other forms of contraception, just as it should be in men.
However as the comments in this thread indicate, all the risks that are present in women's hormonal birth control are considered too dangerous to be prescribed to men.
Do we in fact know that the side effects (of which method?) are equivalent to female birth-control (again - which?), or are you speculating? And is avoiding unknown side-effects a sign of fragility, or caution?
For example, blood clots. Hormonal birth control causes blood clots. But nowhere nearly as often as pregnancy.
Would you apply the same reasoning for men? There’s a school of medical ethics that says treatments must focus exclusively on good outcomes for the patient.
According to this school of thought, prescribing a man a pill that has a .001% chance of blood clots to prevent his female partner from having a .01% chance of blood clots is unacceptable.
And this is a very, very influential line of thought among doctors.
> very, very influential line of thought among doctors
I'm not very "rah rah we currently live in a patriarchy", but wtf? Is it not elementary to consider GROUP effects when dishing out medicine? If a couple (most of the people where the women is taking birth control) come into a doctor's office with that blood clot predicament, it should not be very hard for a doctor to consider them as a couple, when they can clearly communicate that they care about their total health equally.
If our medical system is mostly only able to consider the primary patient, unable to prescribe medicine taking into account the second order effects in that person's life to people they care about, then our medical institutions are (even more) flawed.
But when you adopt an attitude of “you’re going to have to take one for the team” that’s where the principal comes into play.
It's good for everyone if people are encouraged to make sacrifices that net benefit society. In the long run, everyone should benefit (if the sacrifices and benefitees are equally distributed enough).
Preganancy can cause very bad outcomes. Therefore it's more appropriate contraceptives development focus on women.
Think of it this way - a guy says "yeah I'm on the pill ... no of course I didn't for get to take one of the pills yesterday ... trust me."
Why isn't this as reassuring as a woman stating she's on birth control?
Why are we dealing with a binary that is a woman wants to get pregnant vs not wanting to? In the case where pregnancy is desired birth control is by definition irrelevant.
So the correct thing to compare is the health risks to a non-pregnant woman vs the health risks to a man, and the risks from pregnancy have nothing to do with it.