Caitlin Kinast couldn’t help feeling a bit salty during the 12 months her husband, Seth, was on birth control. “His energy was up, through the roof,” she says. “He was super happy, like a teenager again.” She pauses. “I wish my birth control was like that.”
The Kinasts are sitting in a basement fertility lab at the University of Washington in Seattle, one of 15 sites around the world running the first real-life road test of a groundbreaking male contraceptive gel. We’ve barely exchanged pleasantries when Caitlin, 34, starts recounting the years of frustration that brought them here. She’d tried just about every kind of birth control – one prescription after another – but never found one that didn’t cause complications. Seth tried wearing condoms, but they irritated Caitlin’s skin. The couple already had one child and agreed they weren’t ready for a second. Yet it was always Caitlin’s body – and hers alone – that had to deal with the ramifications of
