Men Offer Mixed Opinions on Male Birth Control Pill : Contraception: Men’s rights activists applaud option, but others raise concerns over side effects.

“It’s OK, I’m on the pill.”

How many times has that been said in the 30 years since the birth control pill became available to women who wanted to have sex but not children?

But what if the Food and Drug Administration 30 years ago today had approved an oral contraceptive for men rather than women? Would that line be as reassuring if it came from the man rather than the woman?

“I’m the type of person, I can’t even remember to take a vitamin,” said Bob Turner, 35, a bus driver from Towson, Md., and one of several men asked at random recently about the as-yet theoretical male pill. “I’d also want to know about the cost, the success rate and side effects.”

Turner, like other men interviewed, were most concerned about side effects of any kind of male pill.

“Given all the medical difficulties women have experienced, I wouldn’t take it,” said Maurice Taylor, a 39-year-old attorney. “The hormonal imbalance, the tentative link with cancer . . . just the long-term effect of its use. So given what I know about its impact on women, I wouldn’t take them.”

Manufacturers of the birth control pill--used by more than 60 million women worldwide--say it is generally safe, especially since today’s pill contains lower doses of hormones than the original. Women at risk for blood clots and coronary artery disease or those who smoke should not take the pill.

While research continues into a male version of the pill, birth control more often is directed at women. The reason is both medical and sociological: It is easier, experts say, to interfere with the single egg that a woman produces once a month than the 200 million sperm a man produces in a single act of intercourse. And, because it is the woman who stands to get pregnant, she is considered the one with the vested interest in birth control.

But getting men to take more responsibility for birth control has its adherents not just among women, but also men, especially those involved in the burgeoning “men’s rights” movement.

“I support the development of a male pill,” said Dan Logan, executive director of the Alexandria, Va.-based group, Free Men.

“How come we always treat reproductive rights as a women’s subject and something they control? I think the fact that women carry a womb in their body is an accident of biology. It could just as easily have been men. We have just as much at stake in reproductive subjects as women do.”

“The idea that, ‘It’s my body, I’m bearing the risk, therefore I’m the one who will make the decisions,’ that’s the female chauvinism version of men who think women shouldn’t have the vote because they weren’t the ones who fought in the fields to get democracy,” said Fredric Hayward, executive director of Men’s Rights Inc., also known as MR. INC.

Hayward, whose group is based in Sacramento, said that better male contraception options would help achieve greater equality between men and women.

“Both men and women have inherited roles from which we get power, fulfillment and rewards,” he said. “For men, it has been their careers. . . . For women, by raising children they get power, fulfillment and rewards.”

But, he added, women now have careers available to them, but men have not similarly gotten to be “mothers.”

“It’s important that men get equal access to that opportunity,” Hayward said. “Men have been excluded from full parenthood.”