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Career

The Male Birth Control Pill

For my class ‘Anthropology of Science, Sex, and Reproduction,’  I am doing a project on the development of the male birth control pill.

Projected to be completed and approved for consumer use in three years time, the pill will only remove the vital protein in the sperm that is necessary to fertilize the egg, and will not effect sperm count or fertility in the future. Some of the benefits of the pill are NO physical side effects (unlike the female birth control pill, which has increased risk of stroke and blood clots, etc.) and it will only need to be taken ONCE EVERY THREE MONTHS instead of everyday.

However, one of the main reasons it has taken so long to be researched and developed is because pharmaceutical companies feel that women would not believe men who said they were on the pill, or that men would lie in order to avoid using condoms.

What are your thoughts on the male birth control pill? Do you think it will become as popular as the female birth control pill? Will single guys ignore it and only guys in a serious relationship consider it? Would you believe a guy who suggested to not use a condom and told you he was on the pill?

Share in the comments below and take my survey for my project (the results will be included in a chart in my powerpoint!)

Joanna Buffum is a senior English major and Anthropology minor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.  She is from Morristown, NJ and in the summer of 2009 she was an advertising intern for OK! Magazine and the editorial blog intern for Zagat Survey in New York City. This past summer she was an editorial intern for MTV World's music website called MTV Iggy, writing fun things like album and concert reviews for bands you have never heard of before. Her favorite books are basically anything involving fantasy fiction, especially the Harry Potter series and “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell” by Susanna Clarke. In her free time she enjoys snowboarding, playing intramural field hockey, watching House MD, and making paninis. In the spring of 2010 she studied abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark, and she misses the friendly, tall, and unusually attractive Danish people more than she can say. After college, she plans on pursuing a career in writing, but it can be anywhere from television script writing, to magazine journalism, to book publishing.