More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 21 - April 21, 2024
My key claim is that 99 percent of abortions are the result of unwanted pregnancies, and men cause all unwanted pregnancies.
Talk your shit
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 don’t play a minor or supporting role in pregnancy. Men’s lifelong continual fertility is the central driving force behind all unwanted pregnancies.
Men are fertile all day, every day.
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.
Ovulation only leads to pregnancy when a man chooses to ejaculate and add his sperm. Sperm fertilize. Eggs are fertilized. Ovulation is involuntary. Ejaculation is voluntary.
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.
Men have two options for birth control: condoms and vasectomies. Both are easier, cheaper, more convenient, and safer than birth control options for women.
And troubleshooting condoms doesn’t require multiple doctor appointments.
Not a fan of condoms? Men also have the option of getting a vasectomy.
Again: If women are expected to learn how to use their birth control correctly, the same can be expected of men.
Many men worry that a vasectomy will risk messing up their erections or ejaculations. Men are concerned that they won’t be able to “perform” after a vasectomy, that they’ll be less virile. Because of this, in the United States, only 9 percent of men who are sexually active get vasectomies (but 27 percent of women who are sexually active get tubal ligations).
An additional point: there has never been a documented death from a vasectomy. However, many women have died from anesthetic or surgical complications from a tubal ligation.
Tubal ligations are routinely denied to women who are under thirty-five or who don’t have kids. And not for the reasons outlined above, but because we have a paternalistic medical system that believes women aren’t capable of making decisions about their own bodies.
“If Men Had to Get IUDs They’d Get Epidurals and a Hospital Stay.”
Why are we talking about unwanted pregnancies? Because 99 percent of abortions are the direct result of unwanted pregnancy. And we need to understand very clearly that women enjoying sex does not cause unwanted pregnancies and abortion. What causes unwanted pregnancies and abortion? Men enjoying sex and having irresponsible ejaculations.
Ultimately only the man decides where his sperm ends up. Only he can choose what to do with his sperm and where it goes.
No matter what a woman “lets” a man do, she can’t (legally) make a man ejaculate inside of her. When he does, that’s 100 percent his doing. We know this is true because if she “let” him put his penis in a waffle iron, he wouldn’t. If someone tells you to do an irresponsible thing, and you choose to do that irresponsible thing, that’s on you.
If your bodily fluids have the potential to harm your partner, it’s your responsibility to ensure they don’t.
Another woman explained that she wanted lots of kids eventually, but that her husband “didn’t like using condoms,” and they ended up with four kids in five years—much faster than she had wanted and much faster than her body could handle without serious long-term damage.
She should have kept her legs closed! If she chose to have sex, then she chose to get pregnant. Yes. We love blaming women for enjoying sex. How dare she want to have sex?
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.
No. I’m not taking responsibility away from women, I’m just reminding men of theirs.
Patriarchy teaches us that sex, for women, is a giveaway, while for men it is a takeaway.
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.
Regardless of their experience, most women are pressured to say they are enjoying the pregnancy.
One February, a woman named Jamie Jeffries was feeling proud of herself for talking a woman into continuing an unwanted pregnancy instead of getting an abortion. Eventually the baby was born, and unfortunately, six months later, for the baby’s safety, the government removed the baby from the family’s custody. Jamie found out about this because the mother of the baby had listed Jamie as the “preferred placement” for this baby. Jamie was shocked and upset that someone would expect her to care for the child. She responded, “No. No no no no no no no no no! I do way too much for this work already,
...more
The existential and emotional burden of being a parent is unfathomable.
Related, the adoption rate today for people denied abortion is the same as the pre-Roe rate.
One woman who had relinquished a child and then later had an abortion said that people who claim that abortion trauma is anywhere near as bad as the trauma of relinquishment have no idea what they are talking about.
There are no laws that require the father to pay child support without a court order. It’s not automatic.
If fathers choose to walk out at any point (before or after the child is born), there are no societal consequences for abandoning the child.
