As always, to get approval for a drug, the potential side effects have to outweigh the benefits of the drug. From a purely logical and medical standpoint, there is no medical drawback for a man when the hormonal contraceptive fails and neither is there a medical benefit. If there are serious side effects, they have to outweigh the medical benefit and drawbacks, of which there are none, so that’s pretty hard.
For women on the other hand, medically speaking pregnancy is a huge condition, sometimes dangerous, so there is a benefit and drawback if it doesn’t work and the drugs are approved despite having side effects.
I think that if a company was serious about bringing a male contraceptive to market, the medical benefits of preventing unwanted pregnancies would be taken into account by the EMA/FDA, even if the user of the drug isn’t the primary beneficiary.
The problem is that despite lots of research no viable drug has been found yet.
Oh please. Female contraceptives have been available for 80 years. The first ones were extracted and slightly modified from yams.
We’re now in a time where pharmaceutical development is in a space age compared to what it was 80 years ago. We’ve mapped the entire human genome, we can bioengineer bacteria to spit out custom molecules and proteins, we have freely available XRC 3d models of hundreds of thousands of proteins and their docking sites, we have (free) computational chemistry software that can do quantum molecular dynamics and supercomputers (but you only really need a fucking laptop), and the toolbox of organic chemistry is vastly larger than what it was in the 1950s.
The reason why no-one has come up with a safe and effective male contraceptive that can be anywhere near compared to existing female contraceptives is because it turns out to be fucking difficult.
And let’s not talk about contraceptive pills for men, that have been heavily fought against because one of the listed side effects are impotency.
Instead, let’s push hormones on a sex that relies on them heavily to function properly, and hope that nothing will break.
As always, to get approval for a drug, the potential side effects have to outweigh the benefits of the drug. From a purely logical and medical standpoint, there is no medical drawback for a man when the hormonal contraceptive fails and neither is there a medical benefit. If there are serious side effects, they have to outweigh the medical benefit and drawbacks, of which there are none, so that’s pretty hard.
For women on the other hand, medically speaking pregnancy is a huge condition, sometimes dangerous, so there is a benefit and drawback if it doesn’t work and the drugs are approved despite having side effects.
I think that if a company was serious about bringing a male contraceptive to market, the medical benefits of preventing unwanted pregnancies would be taken into account by the EMA/FDA, even if the user of the drug isn’t the primary beneficiary.
The problem is that despite lots of research no viable drug has been found yet.
Oh please. Female contraceptives have been available for 80 years. The first ones were extracted and slightly modified from yams.
We’re now in a time where pharmaceutical development is in a space age compared to what it was 80 years ago. We’ve mapped the entire human genome, we can bioengineer bacteria to spit out custom molecules and proteins, we have freely available XRC 3d models of hundreds of thousands of proteins and their docking sites, we have (free) computational chemistry software that can do quantum molecular dynamics and supercomputers (but you only really need a fucking laptop), and the toolbox of organic chemistry is vastly larger than what it was in the 1950s.
The reason why no-one has come up with a safe and effective male contraceptive that can be anywhere near compared to existing female contraceptives is because it turns out to be fucking difficult.