Despite significant advances in contraceptive options for women over the last 50 years, world population continues to grow rapidly. Scientists and activists alike point to the devastating environmental impacts that population pressures have caused including global warming from the developed world and hunger and disease in less developed areas. Moreover, almost of half of all pregnancies are still unwanted or unplanned. Clearly, there is a need for expanded, reversible, contraceptive options. Multicultural surveys demonstrate men's willingness to participate in contraception and their female partners to trust them to do so. Notwithstanding their paucity of options, male methods including vasectomy and condoms account for almost a third of contraceptive use in the United States and other countries. Recent, international, clinical research efforts have demonstrated high efficacy rates (90–95%) for hormonally-based male contraceptives. Current barriers to expanded use include limited delivery methods and perceived regulatory obstacles, stymieing introduction to the marketplace. However, advances in oral and injectable androgen delivery are cause for optimism that these hurdles may be overcome. Non-hormonal methods, such as compounds that target sperm motility, are attractive in their theoretical promise of specificity for the reproductive tract. Gene and protein array technologies continue to identify potential targets for this approach. Such non-hormonal agents will likely reach clinical trials in the near future. Great strides have been made in understanding male reproductive physiology; the combined efforts of scientists, clinicians, industry and governmental funding agencies could make an effective, reversible, male contraceptive an option for family planning over the next decade.