Every evening of every day, Meg Waldron took her birth control. First, she underwent the agonizing task of actually finding the small, peach-colored, plastic case among the mountainous rubble crowding her room. Then she popped out the dust bunny-sized pill, stressed about whether it landed in her hand or not, and finally put it in her mouth and swallowed.

Waldron does not go into the stress associated with bringing her birth control places, or the anxiety of making sure she actually swallowed the miniscule thing. Suffice it to say that millions of women around the world do a lot to avoid becoming a mother.

Waldron, a sophomore at SUNY New Paltz and president of the university’s Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, used to be one of those women.

“I was just stressed about taking it at the same time [every night],” says Waldron. “If I was sleeping over at someone’s house and I forgot it, I would panic a couple of hours later.”

After terminating her use of hormonal methods, Waldron returned to the use of condoms as her and her partner’s main source of birth control. Condoms and vasectomies are currently the only forms of male contraception widely available. Compare that with the patch, pill, internal uterine device, diaphragm, and countless other options available to women, and the birth control gap is like a huge cavern yawning between the sexes.

Males may soon be able to count their options on more than two fingers, however. New male contraceptives are currently being developed around the world, and swiftly are gaining popularity here in the U.S.

The Future of Contraception

“Men are really looking for more control over their reproduction,” says Elaine Lissner, director of the Male Contraception Information Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to increasing awareness of developing male contraceptives among government officials, journalists and the public.

There are currently more than a dozen forms of male contraceptives under development, including everything from heat-based suspensories, which are designed to hold a man’s testes closer to his body in order to warm them and consequently sterilize his sperm, to the appropriately dubbed ‘dry orgasm’ pill, which disrupts the transport of sperm by altering the behavior of the vas deferentia during an orgasm.

Three of these experimental methods are considered the most promising, Lissner says. The first, an injection called RISUG, partially obscures the vasa deferentia, blocking the sperm that pass through it. It is reportedly effective for up to ten years and is fully reversible. RISUG is already in Phase III of clinical trails in India, and could be made available in the U.S. within ten years.

“I think the appeal is that it’s non-hormonal,” says Lissner. “It’s really specific to that one tube so it doesn’t affect things all over your body, and it lasts a long time.”

A second popular method is the IVD.The intra-vas device is also designed to block the flow of sperm and was originally tested by an U.S. university professor, Lourens Zaneveld, in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a set of two one-inch long, flexible silicone plugs which are inserted into the vas deferentia; the IVD was proven to be 100 percent effective in a 1995 study.

The third promising avenue are ultrasounds, another heat-based method. Ultrasounds work in a similar way to suspensories; increasing heat while decreasing sperm.