The male birth control gamble

Great news, men, said Rodney Chester in the Sydney Courier Mail. Chinese fertility experts have developed a safe, temporary male contraceptive shot that is as reliable as condoms. With one jab a month, men can be “back in the driver’s seat when it comes to sex,” while relieving their partners of the “hormonal fiddling” of the Pill and saving themselves from fumbling in the dark for a condom. The only problem: Men are lazy and forgetful.

In fact, our survey of about 2,000 Britons found that more than two-thirds of the men said they’d get the testosterone shots, said polling firm Hall & Partners, but “three in four women said they would not trust men to use the new contraceptive.” The older the men, the more willing they were; the older the women, the less trusting of their men.

Our own admittedly “unscientific” poll, said the Chicago Tribune in an editorial, found that roughly half of us secretly think “it’s about time the other 50 percent learned what it’s like to experience a blast of hormones once a month.” But the elusive male “pill” may not hit our shelves anytime soon—men may say they’ll take it, but drugmakers see it like “guy-to-guy greeting cards”—a bad investment risk.

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