Had there been a male contraceptive pill in 1976, I probably wouldn’t be here to write this. That was the year when, after my mum – may she rest in peace – had been on the pill for 12 years, health worries made her doctor tell her to come off it. “She said to the doctor, ‘I’ll get pregnant’,” my dad recalls. “And within a very short while, she was.” He explains, much to my discomfort, that although my parents switched to condoms, I was conceived because “sometimes you feel reckless”. But if a male pill had existed, my dad says, he’d definitely have used it.

So why didn’t it exist? It certainly wasn’t because of a lack of scientific interest. Gregory Pincus, who co-invented the female contraceptive pill, first tested the same hormonal approach on men in 1957, and various hormonal and non-hormonal methods have been explored since. And although attitudes among those who might use a male pill were once thought to be a daunting obstacle, it’s now clear that many men want a new option.

Despite this, we’re still waiting. Developing a method that men would accept has brought decades of frustration, yet researchers are as confident as they can be that they’re close to overcoming the scientific barriers. But, crucially, drug makers’ commitment to contraceptives has always been tentative, particularly when it comes to products for men – and today, the whole contraceptive industry is struggling. Now, the multimillion-dollar question seems to be: Who is actually going to make the male pill happen?

In the 1970s, when my dad might have used a contraceptive pill, prospects seemed better in some ways. Male fertility control was an active research field, with governments backing various ideas to limit overcrowding on Earth. One product he might have been interested in – a non-hormonal drug called gossypol – was being tested on a scale that has never been matched since. At the UN’s 1974 World Population Conference, Elsimar Coutinho, today a famous sex and fertility doctor in Brazil, was promoting the drug, which he was testing on men at the Federal University of Bahia. However, attitudes surrounding sex and reproduction can be unpredictable, and not everyone was convinced of its worth.

“The conference hall was full of women,” Coutinho says on the phone, his gravelly voice matching his website’s picture of a suave doctor with slicked-back grey hair. “I was going to tell them, ‘Now you don’t have to take pills if you don’t want.’” Yet, having determined their own fertility through the contraceptive pill for little more than a decade, his female audience were determined not to relinquish control. “To my surprise, I was shouted down and booed out.”