New Male Birth Control Pill Effectively Prevents Pregnancy Without Side Effects
scitechdaily.com
scitechdaily.com
The pill in the article is a non-hormonal one, which is interesting
Doesn't seem that perplexing. Unless you're into that sort of thing, not that there is anything wrong with that..
I've been waiting for this for more than 10 years now, ever since I've learned about it.
I don't know how long the injections last but if they last a similar time as IUDs. I think this would be acceptable. But maybe there aren't enough men that are willing to get birth control like this, to market this product. The incentive for women to take birth control is much higher after all.
Pass.
I would think that the pill, both the men's and the women's version, would be imminently more preferable to an injection any day of the week? Particularly injections which require preparatory injections to numb pain deemed to exceed acceptable FDA levels for humans. If there is a men's and women's version of a pill, and a men's and women's version of an injection, most men and women would choose the pill.
That seems common sense to me, not squeamish-ness. This pill will garner infinitely many more users. (I mean, assuming it works I guess?)
Perhaps there are different kinds but this is what I'm told..
it’s nowhere close to a solved problem, unfortunately
Bottom line: playing with the endocrine system is risky and not always reversible. I will likely not be taking a hormonal birth control untill I see a lot more longitudinal data.
> will begin testing in human clinical trials in the third or fourth quarter of 2022
It's a shame. Vasectomy can have complications which are often not discussed in the slightest. My father had some of those, though not as bad as others. Occasionally, the results are permanent, despite a reversal of the vasectomy. To paraphrase Orwell, imagine a boot stamping on a your balls—for ever. I am trying to remember the musician who killed himself over it.
Mouse more than man, yes I am ;)
In some sense, maybe that's not bad. The world is probably overpopulated. But if fertility drops too fast it creates real demographics problems in that few young people need to support many old people.
We should do everything to stop any unwanted pregnancies, and then add incentives and aid for everybody who wants to have kids (e.g. parental leave, free daycare, and so on).
> Unintended pregnancies are at an all-time low in the U.S. but still represent about 45 percent of all pregnancies.
45% is wild, and doubly so that this is an all time low.
I could find a million dollars and it would be unintended but not unwanted.
I’d be curious to survey asking those two questions - did you want this child? Did you intend to have this child?
Condoms do both. They are 97% effective if used properly, which isn't hard.
I think "perfect use" of the pill is more difficult, consequently I think the true failure rate is higher. The implants are very effective though.
I've heard some men can't even feel the difference, but to me condoms essentially mean "why even bother?". Having sex with a condom is like saying you went swimming, but actually you went to the aquarium.
But still, in some types of encounters ya gotta do it, for safety.
For long term relationships though there are so many other options.
As a parent I find the environment extremely child-hostile. I don’t want to go into it here, I’m just pointing out there’s a lot of work one could do besides blocking a certain gender from equal access to birth control pills.
Regardless whether the strategies are bad or not, banning contraceptives should never be on the table.
>As a parent I find the environment extremely child-hostile.
It might be child-hostile, but is how child-hostile the environment is actually a consideration? The situation for having children has never been better, but birthrates are some of the lowest they have ever been.
There’s no reason to think it would make things better — and many to think a massive population decline would come with a technology regression and stall of our advancement.
I think such ideas are a form of mental illness, often stemming from delusions about the world.
Right now the absolute worst thing you can do for the environment is to have a child as a westerner.
And we're not hoping for loss of life. Just a more balanced population in the long term.
We can't keep growing until every square meter of this planet is covered with people, I'm sure that's clear. Eventually resources will be constrained too much and massive wars over control of the scraps will be inevitable. Which will solve the problem of overpopulation, sure. But it'll be better to gradually reduce population growth to zero and finally reach a balance with our environment.
Nobody is speaking of a massive decline.
The problem is not running out of material or energy, but the effect of pollution.
By this logic one can rationally claim the best thing you can do for the environment is to die.
We need to be really careful that in our haste to make progress in environmental protection and gender equality, we don't find ourselves heading down the dark path towards eugenics or self-extinction.
We don't avoid killing ourselves or others because of its effects on the environment, which are great. We avoid killing ourselves and others due to other considerations. I bet you can name some so I don't have to.
I'm not sure who this "we" is. Your reasons and mine may be different, and sadly some people can't accept any of these reasons.
It's just about avoiding pregnancies that are not even wanted.
That may well be true for most people. Luckily the environment isn't the only factor in ethical considerations.
>> Right now the absolute worst thing you can do for the environment is to have a child as an African. [0]
Because today's African babies are tomorrow's European migrants, who will bolster the ranks of the polluting global elite.
But we don't want to go here do we?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
However yes in the long term we should not keep growing our world population as a whole. I do understand the need for Africans to have more kids though. For two reasons: A lot more of them die due to poor living conditions, and they serve as a "pension" for the parents.
Obviously these concerns will be solved by better living conditions.
Just out of curiosity, are you also opposed to immigration from third world countries into first world ones?
The issue is that the source of our wealth externalises the cost to the environment. The problem is really with our western society, not the people.
It's pretty likely African immigrants can teach us a thing or two about living more in harmony with nature.
Well this is definitely a line of tortured logic I’ve never heard before in order to square “babies bad, immigrants OK.” But again, who has a higher carbon footprint? An African in Africa or an African in the USA? IMO if your concern is carbon footprint, you need to be against both western births and replacement immigration.
Because we are the main polluters on this planet, not them. We produce tens of times more pollution per person than people in Africa. The buck stops with us. We have to set a more sustainable standard of living and help others to attain it too. It's very unfair that where you're born defines your standard of living.
By looking purely at immigration you're looking only at one tiny piece of the puzzle and disregarding all the others.
There's also the colossal millitary risk of being a nation with bad demographics fighting one with good ones. Which I am not willing to take.
We have to stop this thinking of it being a race where we have to keep ahead of others. We have to work together or we will never solve our environmental issues.
And the thing about a kid emitting 1 ton CO2 per year is nonsense. Just bringing your kid on one international roundtrip flight already emits that much. Not to mention choices made in their name "I have to protect my kids so I have to drive an SUV tank" that I've heard many Irish parents claim. One ton is peanuts.
The growth rate in your western country is pegged, as a matter of policy. It's met through immigration. Whether you have kids or not is neither here nor there; they will meet their target (note that carbon footprints are high in the West, and low in 3rd world countries, to the extent that marginal differences in growth in the 3rd world are irrelevant). This will subside when the global growth rate falters, which is already projected to happen. This can be accelerated by a) improving universal access to contraceptives, and b) improving 3rd world economies through trade and just regulation. In the interim we still need to improve efficiencies in the short-run to curb carbon emissions immediately. Obviously, not having kids has zero impact on this either. Innovations like renewables, seaweed-infused animal feed, etc are entering the market and will help bridge the gap, made possible through political will and investment from the financial sector in the order of trillions.
Don't have kids if you don't want them, surely. But don't pretend it makes a dent in the environmental crusade, and by extension, don't judge parents for a natural desire to start a family.
There’s no reason to think the carrying capacity is down around what we have now, and historically growing population has been the engine through which we’ve solved those problems.
Thinking that we need to “stabilize” at the current population is a delusion leading to insane policy recommendations.
Also — yes, lots of your peers in “sustainability” are talking about massive population declines.
Not to mention how most people don't have serious, productive jobs like doctors or lawyers. Most people have dead-end office jobs, ones that fuel global consumerism. Is that the technology you talk about losing? iPhones and videogames? And even so, unemployment is still an unsolvable problem.
You should drop your fairy tale expectations of living happily forever after. Mathematical models predict population growth and decline in nature. It is completely expected that when the average westerner is satiated emotionally and physically, they are not instinctively pushed to reproduce - why would they, there's nothing serious to work towards.
It'll cause some demographic issues in the short term but we'll just have to deal with that.
Also the planet will be just fine, it is us we’re worried about.
I would define it as a complex ecosystem of interconnected species and we're doing a lot of damage to that that goes far beyond ourselves.
I think this problem is overrated, because at the same time they need to support many less children, youth and young adults. In other words, the ratio `adult workforce` vs. (`retired` + `children` + `in education`) is decreasing only very slowly. And we need a price tag for each of these elements to better assess its impact: How expensive is education and child care per person per year compared to pensions per person per year?
The figure that really matters for the future is purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita. This figure has been rising steadily in most industrialized countries for most of the years. There are no signs that this will change, even if birth rates continue to decline. This means that, regardless the demographic trend, more goods and services are available to everyone on average every year. The real problem is to stop the trend that only part of society benefits from economic growth.
Anyway, my point is that it's more complex than just comparing cash for this vs cash for that, we'll have to coordinate broad policies for a change like this. I think this is already happening in the West, but rather slowly.
When the number of retirees grows relative to the size of the workforce, there is a need to increase the share of capital income and/or welfare payments, because a larger fraction of people depends on them. In reality, the reverse is more likely to happen. The share of earned income is likely to increase due to labor shortage. Retirees will then be worse off, regardless of whether they depend on social security payments or savings.
And partially related: they chose personal weahlth over a healthy planet. At least I feel betrayed, and I guess I am not the only one. So these demographic problems might be accompanied by a change of the younger generation priorities, when confronted with both, a huge old generation that they couldn't care for, even if they wanted to and even if there wouldn't be any further crisis, and a climate crisis caused by the same old generation that is now dependent on them.
If so, that means that you need people. People younger than you. People with some sort of societal attachment to you that results in them not just tossing your entire generation into a metaphorical woodchipper, because taking care of old people is a ton of work.
The traditional way to ensure that such a population of younger people exists has been to have children. Importing immigrants might solve the "people younger than you" side of things, but it is yet to be determined if it adequately solves the "societal attachment" side of things.
In theory you'd have the problem of inflation if each generation put all their contributions into a dedicated fund which was later used to pay their expenses in old age, but fortunately the current contributors can pay for the current beneficiaries, which mitigates that problem.
Immigrants to the US are more financially suited than Americans to the work. Same goes for immigrants in almost any country, or women, or minorities, or anyone who is willing to take a small amount of money for a lot of work. They have various and diverse cultures, just like native-born Americans do.
We're pretty good at preventing people from dying young, and we're pretty good at keeping the elderly barely alive. We're pretty bad at extending how long someone can take care of themselves. I don't think we can sustain a society where people work for 40 years and then are retired for another 40. Quality of life will need to drop substantially, or we'll need massive birth rates.
You can start to see it with that new Alzheimer's drug, Aduhelm. Was originally $56,000 a year, and is now $28,000. The average prognosis for Alzheimer's is 8 years, so we would be talking about an increase of $224,000 in cost of care for an Alzheimer's patient. That's between 4 and 5 years of labor at the average wage in the US. Add in nursing home care, and it won't be shocking if a lot of people's end of life care exceeds their total lifetime earnings.
I don't have a great solution for that. If insurers reduce coverage for end of life care, the effects are going to be mediated by personal wealth. The wealthy will be allowed to retire since they can pay for their own treatment, and the poor will only be allowed to die. You can tax the rich harder, but it's only going to delay the effects for a while.
You say that, but this a majority opinion amongst people I know both in my own age group (late twenties) and my parents age group (late fifties). My circles probably skew liberal, but even so I think that most people now have first-hand experience of elderly loved ones with dementia and the effects of that on both the person themselves and those who have to care for them. I can't see many people wanting that either for themselves of their descendants.
> I don't think we can sustain a society where people work for 40 years and then are retired for another 40. Quality of life will need to drop substantially, or we'll need massive birth rates.
And massive birth rates aren't sustainable either. That only pushes the problem back a few decades. This is why I'd ultimately prefer to my life to be cut short. The only alternative on a societal level is to work much harder while I am alive. I'd rather enjoy my time here and then go and let others have their turn.
We are close to making fully functional life support and robotic nurses. It's more ethical to have robots do this labour than force young people out of their happiest days.
If a population is depending on continued net growth it has to very careful. If there is some constant above which it needs to maintain its growth rate growth will be an exponential process and exponential processes can blow up on you way faster than you might expect.
As an example, suppose we were depending on 1% annual population growth indefinitely and bad things would happen if we could not sustain that. Let's try to put an upper limit on how long we could theoretically sustain that.
Assumptions: we do not develop faster than light travel, do not discover any extra dimensions of spacetime that we can occupy, every human now in existence is near Earth, we don't need space for anything other than holding people, and you can't pack people tighter than 16 people per m^3 (the number of present day people you could fit in a 1m x 1m x 1m cube if we were versatile shape shifters who could take on arbitrary shapes but not change our volume).
Given those assumptions, then N years from now every human in existence must be within N lightyears of Earth. Take the volume of that sphere at year Y and divide it by the number of people that would be alive in year Y at 1% annual growth and we get how much space is in the most optimistic case available per person.
Q: How long before that space per person is less than 1/16th of a cubic meter?
A: ~12000 years.
If we can drop the growth rate to 0.5% we get about 24500 years. If we can drop it to 0.1% we get around 127000 years.
Exponentials are scary.
We have two potential paths as a society between a return to Serfdom, and a future where people still own things.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but to use your case as an example: you might not have anybody in particular taking care of you, but you might collect social security for the next three or four decades. After your initial investment, the majority of that money will be coming from the current working-age population.
I'm pretty sure this will be much lower in Europe though, as we have much less taboos on sexual education.
We will get there eventually. Nothing will stop scientific progress.
Edit: oh I guess you mean that men will pretend they're not taking the pill while they are. I agree with you then.
I would forsee the impact of a male pill as, at absolute minumum, a decimation of replacement level fertility, if not a total evolutionalry select-out of cultures and populations that adopted it. Males who inevitably moralize not propagating will necessarily die off from a genetic perspective. Nice to have the option as a teenager, but in aggregate, as a strategy it seems unwise.
1. Man and woman don't use birth control.
Conception is likely.
2. Man uses birth control. Woman doesn't.
Conception is unlikely.
3. Man doesn't use birth control. Woman does.
Conception is unlikely.
4. Man and woman use birth control.
Conception is extremely unlikely.
1. Man has no birth control. Woman doesn't use hers.
Conception is likely.
2. Man has no birth control. Woman uses hers.
Conception is unlikely.For instance vasectomy for years was considered "safe" even if "definitive" know we know, at least many suggest that vasectomy increase risk of prostate and testicular cancers.
So far the only "permanent" (well, for a certain number of years) contraceptive method we have is the copper IUD, it have menstrual cycle side effect but nothing irreversible or really dangerous.
There is no consensus on this, though, and meta analysis suggest that there is no significant connection [1].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
Anything that affects mammalian fertility can have downstream effects unless the molecule is particularly unstable. Instability however is contrary to a birth control business model, as it introduces uncertainty (see: biodegradable conditions).
I’m also curious about how blocking vitamin A doesn’t have side effects - don’t I need vitamin A?
I guess there are child support for males wrt to (b), which could very well incentivize the use of a male pill.
But the basic point is that, it’s only even considered a possible option for men if there are no side effects.
Yet all forms of birth control for women have side effects.
Women can get a copper IUD with no hormonal side effects inserted in a few minutes and will be protected against pregnancy for up to 10 years (or can opt to have it removed at any time).
If pregnancy occurs, women can just order pills online [0] that will stop it (as long as they detect it in the early stages). Men have no control in the matter. If a woman decides to go forth with a pregnancy against the man's will, he can either abandon his child and have his wages garnished for 18 years, or accept his new situation and become a father.
To be clear, I think the idea that a woman's partner should have any control over whether she gets an abortion is absurd. But women clearly have the advantage when it comes to reproductive choices right now. I hope male birth control pills can help change that.
Also, morning after pills are also not without side effects.
Remember that in many societies up until recent times sex outside of marriage was seriously frowned upon but the woman was often punished much more harshly than the man (if the man was even punished at all).
Women, then, needed birth control more than men did because pregnancy had more severe consequences for women than for men. Relying on men to take care of birth control requires the woman to put a lot of trust in the man, who might not have nearly as strong an interest as the woman in that birth control being successful.
Conspiracy whatever, given the normal effects of vasectony (sensitization of the immune system to sperm) I suspect that's been the problem with it.
wcgw