By Kevin Eisenfrats, co-founder & CEO of Contraline

The most common question I get as the CEO of a company working on male contraception is, “Will men really use a new male contraceptive?” No matter how many market research studies I point to, all of which have determined the answer to be “YES,”(1)(2) it’s a question that often still lingers in the back of peoples’ minds.

Men are not seen as being as attentive to their health in the same way women are. Most men don’t have the dedicated care nor the conversations around sexual health that women receive from their gynecologists from a young age. Since the 1960s, women have been the main users of contraception – after all, they’re the ones who bear the burden of pregnancy. What if the onus for taking contraceptives didn’t have to fall on women? For Valentine’s Day this year, we decided to find out by asking men if they are willing to take a male contraceptive, subjecting their own bodies to a new drug or procedure, to balance the playing field.

From the early days of Contraline, I’d receive emails from men on a weekly basis asking how soon they can get into our clinical trials. In 2018, when I realized I couldn’t respond to each inquiry, we set up a simple landing page. We hoped that this landing page would help us find and quickly recruit clinical trial participants one day. Today, without any active advertising, our sign-up list has 7,032 people on it (growing ~133% per year) who have expressed interest in being in our trials. This includes people from all 50 states, numerous countries, and across all sexually active ages. Ninety-five percent of the sign-ups are men.

But signing up for a listserv is easy, and we wanted to know how serious are these people about trying a male contraceptive? And WHY?

Within minutes of sending the survey, the responses started pouring in. 500 responses in the first hour alone. In 48 hours, we received 1,211 responses, representing over 17% of the entire community.

We found that 85% of our survey respondents use he/him pronouns (n=1,033), 9.4% use she/her, and 5.6% either use they/them or prefer not to say. A vast majority of the respondents live in the U.S., with Canada, Australia, and Germany also showing solid response rates.

The mean age of our respondents was 29 and the median age was 27.

A majority – 84% – of respondents don’t have children. 37% don’t ever want to have kids. The fact that our early adopters skewed so heavily towards being childless was a bit surprising to us.

Getting right into it, we asked respondents how serious they were about trying a new male contraceptive within 12 months of it being commercially available and, separately, at some point in their life (1 = not serious or interested at all, and 5 = very serious and interested).

As seen in the chart below, 97.2% of responses were a 4 or 5 when it came to using a new male contraceptive in their lifetime. 90% when asked if they would use it within 12 months of being available! Overall, around 75% of respondents were a 5 about using new male contraceptive within 12 months of being available.

To address the “why,” we posed two questions: (1) Select the main reasons why you would be interested in trying a new male contraceptive, and (2) Select the reasons that make you the most excited about a new male contraceptive becoming available.

The main reason why people are so interested in trying a male contraceptive is that they want more control over their reproduction. This is supported by the fact that >60% of respondents’ partners have/had issues with their contraceptives, and >50% of respondents selected they don’t like using condoms and aren’t interested in vasectomy. There is a clear gap in the contraceptive product landscape that needs to be filled. Existing products are not meeting the demands and people are looking for novel, effective, safe (non-hormonal), and appealing ways to contracept.

Perhaps more surprising were the reasons that made these predominantly male participants excited about male contraception. The top two reasons were “removing burden off women as the main users of contraception” (85.7%) and “balancing responsibility / reproductive equity" (77.7%). These reasons surpassed “more control over when I have children” and “easier or better than the method I’m currently using.” I believe that people, especially men, are recognizing that we as a society need to change the overbearing reliance on women when it comes to family planning.

Finally, we addressed the question of whether the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade had any impact on people’s interest in male contraception. I’ve generally assumed the answer to be yes. For example, since the Dobbs decision, there has been a reported 26-35% increase in vasectomy appointments (3). But we’ve never asked that question to our community, many of whom have been interested in male contraception for years. What we found was that 33% of participants said the Dobbs decision had no impact on their desire to use a new male contraceptive, and for 30.5% of respondents, it impacted them very strongly. The community was pretty evenly split between the two. While the Dobbs decision may have brought the topic of reproductive health to the forefront of many peoples’ minds, the trend of men wanting to take more responsibility for family planning started well before 2022.

I hope that this survey demonstrates that there are men who want to take control over their reproduction and balance the contraceptive playing field. In fact, we estimate it’s as many as 17 million men who are willing to “step up” in the United States alone. I can imagine a few years from now: it’s Valentine’s Day, and a boyfriend says to his girlfriend, “Honey, let ME take care of the birth control.” What’s more romantic than that? We invite you to follow our journey at Contraline as we and our incredible community continue to pave the way forward for male contraception.