In the swinging sixties the revolutionary contraceptive pill was introduced and it quite literally changed the sex lives of most of the western world.
It also placed the responsibility for reproduction squarely at the feet of women.
Besides the use of condoms which are not nearly as safe as ‘the pill’, the only way a man could prevent pregnancy was by having a vasectomy.
For many years scientists have been attempting to come up with a male alternative and they now believe they are closer than ever before.
A recent trial has ended with an almost one hundred percent success rate, in fact only one in every hundred men fathered a child during the research which lasted two years.
Even women’s contraception can not better this figure, so there are high hopes for this testosterone based male injection.
Men aged between twenty and forty five years, all of whom had previously fathered a child with a healthy partner were part of the National Research for Family Planning trial carried out in Beijing. Each of the one thousand men was injected with the drug and no obvious side affects were noted.
One of those involved with the research, Dr Yi-Qun Gu, also explained that in most cases the sperm count of the subjects was returned back to normal after a six month period. This means that at last there could be a viable alternative to ‘the pill’ and that male contraception is not too far away.
It may have been a log time coming but the contraception is an important step and a great way of sharing the important responsibility of bringing a baby into this world.
