In an excellent rundown of current male-contraceptive technology in development, Soumya Vemuganti of RHRealityCheck.org says a product I’ve been waiting for for years has been approved by the FDA last year.

Confirming Lack of Sperm Production 

Since it takes just one sperm to fertilize an egg, it is extremely important to confirm a lack of sperm production using any of the aforementioned male contraceptives.   A product approved by the FDA last year will help to measure the effectiveness of male contraceptives which block spermatogenesis.  SpermCheck Vasectomy offers patients an at home method of measuring their sperm levels post-vasectomy.  It is easy to imagine that this product could also be used to measure the efficacy of reversible male contraceptives; in fact, SpermCheck Contraception is in the works. 

Read the quote in context here.

Because non-barrier/non-vasectomy contraception for men is almost always going to be a lot more complicated than the main non-barrier/non-IUD contraceptives for women having a method to confirm one’s infertility seems pretty critical. And, obviously, it’s just as critical to be able to confirm one’s male partner’s infertility as well. I’m guessing that at least initially the test won’t be cheap enough for casual use — the size of a market based on one-time-only post-vasectomy tests can’t be terribly high — on the order of several hundred thousand a year — and they’ve gotta recover their costs somehow. Presumably with the advent of oral/injectable contraceptives or, possibly more exciting, hotpack-based methods (who knew? but they say it can be 100% effective!) the market could grow into the tens of millions of repeat customers. Presumably that would make the product affordable for frequent use.

One of the few things generally applicable things Ronald Reagan said (over, and over, and over… he was already developing Alzheimer’s) during his negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev was “trust but verify.” Which seems like a tailor-made tagline for a fertility testing product.