Today Having Kids announced a campaign to prioritize the male pill. It’s time to expedite the approval and mass marketing of the male pill and other long-acting reversible male contraceptives. Why is there no male pill on the market today?
It seems regulators forgot to consider the environmental impacts of blocking approval. According to extensive research by Having Kids, there is no evidence that federal regulators ever considered impacts of their inaction on world ecosystems, or the way that failure exacerbates climate change, and a host of other man-made environmental crises, like ocean acidification and mass extinction. Instead, regulators stopped prior approval protocols for reasons that have a lot to do with gender bias, and at the same time federal policy was openly encouraging population growth and limiting access contraception and abortions, as a cheap way to grow the economy. That policy has only gotten worse.
“Our federal government ignored the environmental impact of its decision to approve things like Viagra, but not the male pill,” according to Erika Mathews, Executive Director of Having Kids. “It did so while employing sexist rationales about unacceptable side effects women experience all the time, and in the face of other policies that push women to produce cheap labor and voracious consumers to inflate the economy.”
Having Kids’ campaign will lobby Congress and regulators for a massive increase in funding and prioritization of approval as a matter of national security, given the impact approval would have on the social and ecological environment.
- Experts are calling for a “contraception revolution,” in light of projected growth and a population-fueled climate crisis:
- Current efforts in regions with the highest projected growth are failing, which portends disaster.
- Access to contraception is not enough without a change in norms, or the models that underlie the way we plan families.
According to Erika, “If our government had done the assessment correctly we would have had the male pill and other forms of male contraceptives years ago. Instead they made the situation worse.” Let’s start prioritizing the male pill.
