Male birth control pill on long finger

Heart-stopping poison once used on the arrow tips of tribal warriors points the way towards that most elusive of contraceptive devices: the male birth control pill, writes By Rita de Brún.

As buzz-kill phrases go, ‘birth control’ is up there with the best. A wet rag in the face of romance, it signals the antithesis of a real good time.

But every now and again something edgy happens, something that shakes things up, something that revives the universal flagging interest in a topic that, let’s face it, is usually the reserve of women.

Such a thing is happening right now in the University of Minnesota. There, a team of scientists has made great progress in creating a male contraceptive pill, using an African plant extract called ouabain.

So far so tedious, I hear you say. But ouabain is anything but. So lethal a poison is it, that tribal warriors and hunters dipped their arrow tips in it, to induce cardiac arrest in both human and animal prey.

Given its origins it’s hardly surprising that the drug-in-the-making has killer traits in so far as it massacres the protein in sperm cells that’s critical to conception.

If clinical trials find it to be safe, effective and reversible, it may well be the first male birth control pill to make its way onto pharmacy shelves.

Dr Gunda Georg, who’s leading the ground-breaking Minnesota research, told the Irish Examiner that to get that far, funding is required.

If funding becomes available and clinical trials go well, how many years before this male pill would be available to the public? “Ten,” she replies. That’s predictable too.

For decades, the male pill has, despite the best efforts of copious groups of scientists working in laboratories dotted across the planet, been an elusive 10 years or more away.

Of course the world can wait for it to hit the stores. After all, the want of one has never called a halt to seduction’s gallop.

Take Casanova for instance. He, being a prolific seducer of women, had a vested interest in pregnancy prevention.

But rather than dull his own coital pleasure in the process, the Venetian spy had his lovers prepare for his advances by way of thrusting a lemon half, high into their nether regions.

As for what Casanova’s lady companions thought of this twisted practice, we don’t know. Nor do we know whether he was a gentleman or a cad.

But if we presume he was the former, it’s possible that when his about-to-be-seduced consorts were engaged in their intimate contraception preparations, he spared their blushes by casting his doubtless fathomless gaze in another direction — perhaps triumphantly towards his bedpost and the ever-increasing number of notches carved thereon.

Lemons, along with honey, were among the least harm-inducing items used by pregnancy adverse women. In the Middle Ages, arsenic, lead, strychnine and mercury were ingested, with dire consequences no doubt.

The fact that women have long got the short end of the contraception stick was touched on in Homer’s Iliad. In that epic poem, Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos of Crete, lined her vagina with a passion-killing goat’s bladder, as protection against the scorpions and serpents that lurked in his semen and caused death in her husband’s mistresses.

Logan Nickels, director of operations and programs at the Male Contraception Initiative.

While that may be one instance in which fiction is stranger than truth, it’s also a reminder that animal intestines were among the earliest forms of male condom, as were squares of ribbon-secured linen.

Today’s men are not averse to trying new methods of contraception. Vasalgel, a type of reversible vasectomy that works by injecting a gel into the scrotum, is on track to go on the market in the next few years.

Former Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) chairman, Dr Andrew Rynne, was the first Irishman to perform vasectomies in Ireland in 1974. While it must have been a tad scary for the men who signed up that year for what was then a novel procedure here, Dr Rynne’s no slouch on the bravery front himself.

When his parish priest visited to express outrage at his work, and mentioned ‘immorality’ and ‘mutilation’ in the process, he responded by showing his visitor the door.

These days, he consults via the Medical Advice For You online service. Asked for his view on the merits or otherwise of a male contraceptive pill, he replies: “The problem is and always has been an inevitable delay in onset of effectiveness.

“The sperm that a man produces today will have been made by his testes three to four weeks ago. After that, his sperm spend weeks travelling along his vas before, as it were, seeing the light of day.

“So, even if a male contraceptive pill is safe and effective at the time of sperm manufacture, it can have no effect on the healthy sperm already within the collecting system. And therein lies the problem.

“Because it immediately stops ovulation, the female contraceptive pill is effective from the very first pill she [the woman] takes.

"This can’t be the case with any proposed male contraception. There will always be an inevitable delay in onset of effectiveness and a semen analysis would probably be required to establish exactly when that date arrived. Can you see this going down well with most men?”

His point is in some ways echoed by Logan Nickels, director of operations and programs at the US based Male Contraceptive Initiative (MCI).

Asked for his take on why, despite copious research, there’s still no male birth control pill on the market, he says: “Firstly, it’s a question of biology. Women produce one egg per month; men produce 1,000 sperm per second.

Stopping that process is difficult; especially when it’s what the male reproductive system entirely exists to do.”

His passion to see safe and effective male pills on the market is apparent. But if that were to happen tomorrow, would Irish men be ready for it?

James McDonagh, a psychosexual therapist who runs the Counselling 4 U clinic, thinks not: “The male sexual psyche is very fragile. I’m not talking now, about macho men who throw their sex around.

"I’m talking about the average Irish male. Take away potency, masculinity and being a man, and what’s a man left with, from a male sexual psyche prospective, other than questions such as: What am I? And who am I?” So, taking a male contraceptive pill might destabilise the male sexual psyche? “It might,” he replies.

On the topic of whether the Irish male, particularly those who regularly engage in casual flings, would likely experience peace of mind in taking a male pill, McDonagh opines: “The male logical brain doesn’t engage during the act. Very little rational thinking goes on.”

Doubtless that lack of rational thinking plays a role in the number of unplanned pregnancies in Ireland.

In a Durex study last year into contraceptive practices in Ireland, 24% of women polled said they had an unintended or crisis pregnancy in the past.

One day, male birth control pills will be among the increased contraceptive options likely to reduce the number of such pregnancies. But the question is: will women trust their men to take it?

According to UK research carried out at the Anglia Ruskin University, 52% of women surveyed were concerned that their partners would forget to do so.

The fact that 17% of the males polled in the same study thought men would indeed forget will have done nothing to assuage their fears.