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.

An unwanted pregnancy doesn’t happen because people have sex. An unwanted pregnancy only happens if a man ejaculates irresponsibly—if he deposits his sperm in a vagina when he and his partner are not trying to conceive. It’s not asking a lot for men to avoid this.

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.

That seems pretty straightforward: Keep sperm away from eggs for one week each month. Doable. Clear cut. Except for one big problem: Women don’t know when their egg is going to be fertile.

31 percent of the women in the study believed their cycle was 28 days, but only 12 percent of them had an actual 28-day cycle. 87 percent of the women had menstrual cycle lengths between 23 and 35 days. Over half the women (52 percent) had cycles that varied by 5 days or more. For those women who did have a 28-day cycle, there was a 10-day spread of ovulation, and the same was true for all the different cycle lengths they studied.

Even if cycle length can be predicted, the day of ovulation can be very variable, meaning that you cannot accurately predict the fertile phase using cycle length alone.

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.

Women cannot choose when ovulation begins or ends. Women cannot control the movement of their egg. During sex, women cannot remove their egg from their body and place it in someone else’s body. If sperm are nearby and the egg is fertile, the egg will activate and interact with the sperm, helping them penetrate the egg surface, but until then, the egg stays where it is and waits. It does not leave the body in search of a substance that can impregnate it.

Just pick up a pack of Pills when you’re grabbing a bottle of ibuprofen, easy peasy. But that’s not actually true. It’s not true about the Pill, and it’s not true about any forms of birth control for women. Female contraception—Pill, Patch, Ring, Shot, IUD—requires a prescription. For women, this means that access to any form of common birth control starts with a doctor’s appointment and a physical exam.

No big deal, right? It’s just a doctor’s appointment. All you have to do is find a heathcare provider who’s taking new patients; have health insurance; double check that the doctor takes your insurance; wait six weeks for the next available appointment; come up with money for the co-pay; take off work, miss school, or find childcare to attend the appointment; and then lay on the exam table with your legs in stirrups while the doctor explores your most sensitive parts with cold metal medical tools. After that, you’ll need to find a pharmacy and stand in line for forty-five minutes to fill your prescription. Or, if you’re lucky enough to have a fixed address, you could set up an account with an online pharmacy and have the birth control delivered (be sure to monitor your account to make sure deliveries are happening on time and the prescription is up to date).

In July 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that private employers who hold religious or moral objections to birth control aren’t required to include no-cost contraception options as part of their employee health insurance plan. Then, in June 2022, following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas signaled that Griswold v. Connecticut, the case legalizing the use of contraception by married couples, could be up for reversal as well.

Consider the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, which was paused for ten days when a risk of blood clots was discovered. Six people out of the seven million who had received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine developed serious blood clots. One of them died. At the time, it was scary to read the headlines, though the risk of blood clot from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is less than one in a million. In contrast, the common forms of women’s birth control come with a much higher risk of blood clots—oral contraceptives triple the risk of blood clots. According to the FDA, the risk of birth control users developing a serious blood clot is three to nine out of 10,000 each year (and 327 million people are taking hormonal birth control worldwide).

Based on what we know right now, birth control is riskier than any of the COVID-19 vaccines. And yet, it is prescribed daily without hesitation, often beginning at age thirteen or fourteen (sometimes younger).

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.

In conversations about the Pill, I’ve learned that a disturbingly high number of people are working under the assumption that a woman only takes the Pill right before she has sex, and that if she doesn’t have sex that day, then she doesn’t need to take the Pill. They’re picturing it like an aspirin or ibuprofen for a headache—you only take it when you actually have a headache. But that’s not how the Pill works. You have to take it every day no matter what, or it doesn’t work, and you may need to take it for a full week after starting it before it is effective.

Standard birth control pills are taken for twenty-one days, followed by a seven-day break, during which the woman takes a sugar pill or placebo (seven of the placebo pills come in the standard Pill pack of twenty-eight) and experiences vaginal bleeding. So women who take the pill have what seems like a “period” each month. But this “period” is manufactured and isn’t even a little bit necessary. When a person stops taking the Pill for a week and takes the placebo instead, hormone levels drop, which causes the lining of the uterus to shed. But it’s not the same as menstrual bleeding—the body isn’t flushing out an egg—and technically, this “period” is called withdrawal bleeding.

Apparently, the seven-day break and its fake “period” was designed into the Pill as an “attempt to persuade the Pope to accept the new form of contraception as an extension of the natural menstrual cycle.”

This attempt did not succeed, and the current Pope continues to forbid contraception in most cases. But the seven-day “break” is still a part of the Pill, and this unnecessary complication increases the chances for mistakes—mistakes that increase the risk of unwanted pregnancy. A great reminder that most everything about birth control is overly c...

Condoms are convenient. They don’t require a doctor’s appointment or an invasive physical exam of your most sensitive body parts, they don’t require a prescription, and they are easy to find. They can be bought ahead of time and stored for three to five years.

Condoms make cleanup super easy. Condoms keep all the semen in one convenient little sack, which means semen won’t get on bedding or clothing and won’t drip from the woman’s body as she waddles to the bathroom (bonus!).

Condoms are only used as needed.

And finally, condoms work. When

What condoms don’t have is a list of side effects.

Not a fan of condoms? Men also have the option of getting a vasectomy. Vasectomies are safe, effective, and highly reversible. A vasectomy is a quick outpatient procedure with local anesthetic that takes place at a doctor’s office and doesn’t require a hospital stay.

Again, vasectomies are very safe, often covered by insurance, and the most reliable birth control option for men available at 99.99 percent effective. In other good news: Doctors are clear that after a vasectomy you will not experience any differences in your sexual function or pleasure. You will still be able to get an erection and ejaculate, and everything will feel the same.

When learning that 78 percent statistic, a responsible man would not respond: Well, the Pull-Out Method isn’t effective enough, so I won’t bother. But rather: I’d better learn what mistakes to avoid with the Pull-Out Method. This is serious business. I can’t mess around with someone else’s life like that. Part of my becoming an adult means I need to know how to pull out effectively and to do everything I can, like using condoms or considering a vasectomy, to make sure it doesn’t come to that in the first place.

To learn how to put on and remove a condom correctly, a man needs to practice. Practice is necessary to find his correct fit and material preference. Practice is also needed to figure out lubrication techniques (for example, adding a few drops of lubrication inside the condom). Successful condom users report that once they solved the size, materials, and lubrication questions, they could barely tell a difference between sex with a condom and sex without.

On June 25, 2022, a designer who goes by @studio lemaine tweeted: “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.”

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).

But the biggest advantage may be psychological. Couples commonly report much improved sex lives after a vasectomy. Why? Because unwanted pregnancy stress is eliminated. Disappeared! Men also frequently report that the procedure is quick and easy, almost pain-free, and the recovery is straightforward and simple.

Dr. Alexander Pastuszak of the University of Utah Medical Center says: With tubal ligation you need to make an actual hole in the abdomen, which by surgical standards is a minor surgery, but it’s still much more major than a vasectomy. I don’t see any reason why a tubal ligation would be or should be preferred over a vasectomy.

I 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

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.

In 2016, the World Health Organization conducted a trial for male birth control—a hormonal injection that would lower sperm count. The results were very promising, showing a 96 percent effectiveness rate at preventing pregnancy. But even with the positive results, the trial was stopped. A committee determined the side effects of the drug were risking the safety of the study participants. The most common side effects were acne and weight gain, which are also very common side effects for women’s birth control. The most serious side effects for the men was that one participant became depressed and another suicidal. Which I agree is very serious. But side effects for women’s birth control options are just as serious, if not more so—yet millions of women are still prescribed these drugs and ingest them daily.

these two procedures—one for men, and one for women—are both invasive and both involve very sensitive body parts. It’s expected that the procedure will be painful for men, so pain relief is always administered. For women, it’s expected that if it is painful, the women will just endure it, and pain relief is almost never administered.

“If Men Had to Get IUDs They’d Get Epidurals and a Hospital Stay.”

In the early 1990s, researchers were studying a drug called sildenafil citrate. The hope was that the drug would help prevent and/or solve heart conditions. As the study progressed, the drug showed promising results for another condition: a fix for “penile winter,” more commonly known as erectile dysfunction. The panel of decision-makers who were funding the study decided they would pursue the research for erectile dysfunction. Eventually the drug came to market. It was called Viagra. In subsequent tests for the same drug, sildenafil citrate, they discovered that it also offered significant and lasting relief for women suffering from serious period pain. That same team of decision-makers, all of whom were men, decided against pursuing research on menstrual cramp relief. Why? They believed that cramps were not a public health priority.

On the one hand, you can choose to make it easier for older men to achieve and maintain an erection. On the other hand, you can choose to relieve women’s suffering from serious period pain. And you choose the erections. Why in the world would you not choose both? I know. I know. It’s probably money. But even that isn’t adding up for me. 64 million men worldwide have been prescribed Viagra since 1998. That’s a lot of people. But the potential market for period pain is 3.1 billion people.)

When men choose to have condom-less sex, they are putting a woman’s body, health, social status, job, economic status, relationships, and even her life, at risk in order to experience a few minutes of slightly more pleasure.

1) men not understanding or not appreciating what this actually means for women, 2) a culture that reinforces this ignorance, and 3) the all-too-human mandate to maximize pleasure, even at the disregard of possible consequences.

When masturbating, 95 percent of women orgasm. In first-time hookups with other women, they orgasm 64 percent of the time. But in first-time hookups with men, they orgasm only 7 percent of the time. So we know that when we ignore the experience of women’s pleasure during sex, the problem isn’t women’s ability to orgasm. It’s our cultural approach toward heterosexual sex and our focus on men’s pleasure over everything else.

A woman experiencing pleasure and orgasm has never caused a pregnancy. Of course, this flies in the face of people bent on “slut-shaming” women and blaming women’s libidos and “slutty” behaviors for unwanted pregnancies.

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.

You may be thinking: But if it’s consensual sex, then they both caused the unwanted pregnancy! Well, not really. Even in the case of consensual sex, the man gets final say. This is how it works: Step 1: Woman consents to sex. Step 2: Man decides if he will ejaculate responsibly.

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.

her “yes” doesn’t render him physically incapable of putting on a condom, saying “no,” or getting a vasectomy.

Why would a woman ever need to ask a man to wear a condom? Why wouldn’t it be the default that men should provide their own condom and put it on without a request? Who benefits if the man doesn’t wear a condom?

If you have a son, his sperm can “infect” any woman he has sex with. As parents, as a culture, we need to emphasize how carefully sperm needs to be handled. Pregnancy and childbirth are known to kill women. Pregnancy and childbirth are highly likely to leave permanent scars and cause future health problems, including possible future infertility. Unplanned pregnancy and childbirth can have a significant negative impact on the quality of life for the future child and their parents.

If a man can easily prevent unwanted pregnancies by controlling his own actions, but he’s only interested in preventing unwanted pregnancies if women are controlling the actions, it seems like he’s much more interested in controlling women than he is in reducing unwanted pregnancies.

No. 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.