Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion

by Gabrielle Stanley Blair

For those who want to effectively reduce abortion (or outlaw it altogether, as many states have done), this focus on women is a fundamental mistake for two reasons: 1) because there is clear data that abortion bans are ineffective and 2) because, again, men cause all unwanted pregnancies. If you’re focused on women, you’re wasting your time.

We’ve put the burden of pregnancy prevention on the person who is fertile for 24 hours a month, instead of the person who is fertile 24 hours a day, every day of their life.

We treat ejaculation as something that happens at random, that is unintentional, that is impossible to anticipate or predict. And we treat ovulation like it can be pinpointed well in advance and easily predicted. Somehow, we’ve confused the two.

Men, consider what your girlfriend/wife/partner is doing for you. She’s fertile 3 percent of the time and addressing her fertility 100 percent of the time, whether she has sex or not.

A woman having an orgasm while a man penetrates her risks nothing and hurts no one. A man having an orgasm while he penetrates a woman risks everything—he risks her body, her health, her income, her relationships, her social status, even her life, and he also risks creating another human being.

If you actually want to reduce abortions, you need to start much earlier. Instead of focusing on abortions, you need to focus on preventing unwanted pregnancies. And to do that, you need to focus on preventing irresponsible ejaculations. If your focus is solely on abortion and whether it is a legal or moral right, you still won’t reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and you won’t reduce the number of irresponsible ejaculations. But! If you focus on dramatically reducing the number of irresponsible ejaculations, you will dramatically reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and you will dramatically reduce the number of abortions.

I think it’s safe to say that if sex were as risky for men as it is for women—with an unwanted pregnancy potentially leading to loss of social status, loss of career, a disruption of their education, physical disability, death, and the permanent responsibility for another human—that men would insist on having a choice in the matter.

Adoption is rarely a clean slate for anyone involved. The actual narrative includes well-documented, widespread issues in the “adoption industry”—corruption, trauma, human-trafficking—which can bring lifelong negative repercussions for the child and the birth mother.

We’re not asking too much when we expect men to control their sexual urges, when we expect men to take responsibility for their own bodily fluids, when we expect men to ejaculate responsibly.

The most effective, proven way to reduce abortions that we know of is free and accessible birth control. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Colorado created a program that made birth control free and easily accessible. The result? Abortion rates fell by almost half. And not just Colorado—St. Louis had a similar program with great results. As a bonus, these programs can save millions of dollars. The health department in Colorado reported that every dollar spent on that birth control initiative saved $5.85 for Colorado’s Medicaid program.

A culture of ejaculating responsibly, combined with free and accessible birth control and thorough sex education, will bring the number of unwanted pregnancies close to zero.

Don’t lecture women about their bodies while avoiding conversations with men about their bodies. These conversations can shift the national and worldwide conversation around abortion away from unproductive debates about women’s bodies and toward helpful and practical discussions about what men can do to prevent pregnancy.

In every Q&A with a politician and every political debate where abortion is brought up, ask specific questions: What is your plan for preventing irresponsible ejaculations? Where are the programs for free, accessible birth control? Where are the statewide sex-ed programs that explain how dangerous sperm is? What should the legal consequences be for men who cause unwanted pregnancies?