The quest for the male pill is, in many ways, the search for the holy grail of contraception. More and more people are clamoring for options that would allow men to share in the burden of preventing pregnancy. Having a birth control pill available to men will mean much more advertising in the pharm world that one could imagine. This is why it is best to explore the possibility of having such a pill in the near future.

A 2005 study showed that nearly 50 percent of men in the United States would be willing to try a new form of birth control, and up to 72 percent of men in other countries are interested in new forms of male contraception.

So why don’t we have a male birth control pill?

“Certainly, contraception has commonly been the responsibility of the woman in the past,” says Dr. Peter Schlegel, Professor and Chairman of Urology at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/ Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. “But there’s no reason that couldn’t change.” Standing in the way, however, are many factors that make it difficult to produce male contraception.

“Stopping all sperm production or disabling all sperm is a real challenge, when you’re making [millions of] sperm a day,” Schlegel says. Male physiology is a lot more complicated than female physiology,” says Daulat Tulsiani, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. “Initially, [it was] thought there was one molecule on the egg and on the sperm that played a role in their interaction.”