Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion

by Gabrielle Stanley Blair

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.

At eighty years old, a woman who menstruated for forty years will have experienced 480 days of fertility. At eighty years old, a man who hit puberty at age twelve will have experienced 24,208 days of fertility.

Once we recognize this disparity in fertility, it becomes crystal clear that pregnancy and abortion are not “a woman’s issue.”

Men’s lifelong continual fertility is the central driving force behind all unwanted pregnancies.

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 great reminder that most everything about birth control is overly complicated and difficult, and men in power are largely responsible for these complications.

“It is very difficult and emotional to read ‘no one is forcing you to have unprotected sex’ when men do. All the time. Boyfriends and partners and abusers—the whole spectrum. Men pressure us for unprotected sex all the time.”

do anesthesia for a living, done it for hundreds of tubals I’m sure. I often think: WTF is wrong with the husband? Except when part of a C-section, tubals should be rare. Vasectomies are cheap, low-pain, extremely safe, and highly effective. Why are tubals also a burden that women must carry?

It should be very clear that when a couple is deciding between a vasectomy for the man or a tubal ligation for the woman, the vasectomy should be the easy choice every time.

The reigning assumption is that if a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant, then she’ll do whatever it takes to prevent a pregnancy from happening.

Women who are sexually active are expected to use birth control or an IUD. Women are also expected to insist that men use a condom, which implies that women should keep condoms stocked. (It creates one of those fun double binds women get to deal with—if she has condoms, she’s a slut, but if she doesn’t have condoms, she’s irresponsible.)

Even though birth control options for men have a long list of distinct advantages, we’ve put the burden of pregnancy prevention on women. We’ve put the burden 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 don’t mind if women suffer, as long as it makes things easier for men.

All unwanted pregnancies are caused by irresponsible ejaculations. Or, in simpler terms: Men cause all unwanted pregnancies.

Men can easily prevent unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortion by choosing to ejaculate responsibly.

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.

we can see that this focus on men is a practical decision. This is a one-way street, and we’ve been driving the wrong way. We need to focus on men and stopping irresponsible ejaculations. Everything else—reducing unwanted pregnancies, reducing abortions—follows from this critical focus.

I’m not taking responsibility away from women, I’m just reminding men of theirs.

Don’t ask: Why don’t women pick better men? Instead, ask: Why are there so many abusive men? And: Why don’t we teach men not to abuse?

Men carry, abort, suffer complications from, labor, deliver, and die from 0 percent of unwanted pregnancies. Men can and do walk out on pregnancies. Women cannot.

a pregnant woman is more likely to die due to that pregnancy than a police officer is to be killed on the job.

The United States in particular is a difficult place to be a mother. It has inaccessible, expensive healthcare; no paid leave from work; crumbling infrastructure (including public schools); and little by way of a social safety net when things go wrong.

research is clear that outcomes for children who are born from unwanted pregnancies are . . . not great. Children born from unwanted pregnancies can experience a lack of attachment with their mothers, delayed cognitive and emotional development, and a higher likelihood of experiencing domestic violence.

It’s strange when you think about it, because if men were actually interested in reducing abortion, it didn’t need to take fifty years. At any point, men could have eliminated elective abortions in a very short amount of time—a matter of weeks—without ever touching an abortion law, without legislating about women’s bodies, without even mentioning women. All men had to do was ejaculate responsibly. They chose not to. Today, they continue to choose not to.

Don’t lecture women about their bodies while avoiding conversations with men about their bodies.

Call politicians out for hypocrisy, for using abortion as a political tool. Don’t let them derail the conversation with emotional appeals. Force them to answer questions about actual steps they are taking that are proven to reduce unwanted pregnancies and irresponsible ejaculations.