Elaine Lissner is the director of the Male Contraception Information Project and of Parsemus Foundation, an organization dedicated to sponsoring contraceptive developments that include Vasalgel and an H.I.V. transmission-reducing pill.

Imagine you’re a 20-something or 30-something man, out on the dating market. You have grad school planned for the fall and your whole life ahead of you. You meet a woman who seems pretty promising; after you’ve been dating a number of months, you stop using condoms, because she’s on the pill. But you just read an article that said even among highly motivated young college women, about half forgot to take roughly three pills per cycle. Nervous yet?

If we’re serious about wanting new choices, we need to finish the work that has been started.

In the effort to improve family planning options, we’ve somehow overlooked half of humanity: men haven’t gotten a new option in more than a century. And it’s not that men aren’t interested: Men are already using the only two methods they have – condoms, which are not perfect, and vasectomy, which is basically permanent – in great numbers. Add in withdrawal, and men are covering nearly a third of U.S. contraceptive use. At least in the United States, the idea that men aren’t willing to participate is clearly out of date.

Yet developing long-acting, reversible methods for men is still not seen as a priority. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and U.S.A.I.D. are getting serious about new long-acting options for women; not so, yet, for men. National Institutes of Health funding helps some researchers make it through the first steps, but cannot finish the multimillion-dollar task of seeing potential products through to market.

So will a new method always be five to 10 years away? Not if we stay focused. The pipeline is already full, and if we’re serious about wanting new choices, we need to finish the work that has been started, not do more basic research.

More than 23,000 men and women have signed a petition calling for new methods, and 18,000 men and women are waiting to hear about clinical trials for Vasalgel, the method furthest along. Individual men desperate to have more control over their reproductive destinies have been donating thousands of dollars to the project.

Given the lack of large-scale funder support, Vasalgel is the method most likely to make it to the U.S. market in the near future; it is fortunate to be a device, not a drug, and to have a growing popular movement behind it. If social investors step up, it has a chance. But it is also near-criminal that a method like the "Clean Sheets Pill," which is not as far along but could drastically reduce H.I.V. transmission, is stalled for want of one $300,000 study.

Stay focused, devote the proper scale of resources, and finish the job. Is that so much for men (and their partners) to ask?



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