A male contraceptive pill may still prove too hard to swallow
Some of the earliest efforts at male contraception took guts – literally. In the 17th century, butchers crafted sheaths from the intestines of sheep and goats, to prevent both syphilis and pregnancy. The vasectomy came along later, cheerily hailed by one eugenicist in a 1909 scientific paper as “a means of preventing procreation in Defectives”.