Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion

by Gabrielle Stanley Blair

Bringing up the topic of men or their responsibilities is not actually a comment on women at all.

Interestingly, when I point out that women are currently expected to do the vast majority of pregnancy prevention, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say, “This can’t be right. This seems too unequal; it feels wrong.” The imbalance only seems to strike people as out-of-whack if it’s applied to men.

Murder is the leading cause of death for pregnant women, often committed by the man who impregnated them. If that doesn’t underscore the power dynamic in sexual relationships, I don’t know what will.

The reality is, men are no better at identifying the abusive men in their lives than women are. Statistically, every man knows abusers in real life—there are abusers among his coworkers, his neighbors, his group of friends, and his church congregation. But men don’t seem to know which of the other men they know are abusive. So why would women be able to know this?

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.

The United States, one of the richest countries in the world, is ranked #56 in maternal mortality—that’s dead last among industrialized countries.

The leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States is homicide, usually at the hands of an intimate partner.

in the United States, the mortality rate for pregnancy is 17.4 per 100,000 people. The on-duty murder rate for police officers is 13.5 per 100,000 people. Which means a pregnant woman is more likely to die due to that pregnancy than a police officer is to be killed on the job.

mothers are the sole or primary provider in 40 percent of households with children.

I keep using this word because it fits: The existential and emotional burden of being a parent is unfathomable.

About 60 percent of women who have abortions are already parents—so

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.

Beyond that, pregnancy-as-punishment doesn’t make sense. Consider that women’s bodies spontaneously abort 40 to 60 percent of embryos between fertilization and birth—these are called miscarriages if they occur before twenty weeks of pregnancy, and they are called stillbirths if they happen after twenty weeks.

Related, the adoption rate today for people denied abortion is the same as the pre-Roe rate.

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.

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.

And an estimated $10 billion in child support payments go uncollected each year.

It is up to the mother to pay to prove paternity, pay a lawyer, and fight for child support in court.

If she does manage to collect, the average child support order is $400 a month,

Our society is set up to protect men from the consequences of their own actions. Our laws and policies could not be better designed to protect men who abandon the pregnancies they cause.

There are no laws that require the father to pay child support without a court order. It’s not automatic.

In many states, credit scores are not affected by failure to pay child support.

Fathers aren’t fired from their jobs for impre...

Fathers are not billed for any medical expenses for the pregnancy or the child. (In at least two states, fathers can be legally required to pay for at least 50 percent of pregnancy related medical costs. Should we assume the mother has to be willing to fight for those paymen...

Fathers don’t have to take unpaid weeks or months off work for pregnancy comp...

Fathers don’t lose a cent in wages for impreg...

Fathers aren’t generally required to pay any funeral expenses for a deceased child. (At least two states consider it the resp...

If fathers choose to walk out at any point (before or after the child is born), there are no societal consequ...

When the topic of abortion comes up, they might think: Abortion makes me uncomfortable. Women should not choose abortion. And they never once consider the man who caused the unwanted pregnancy.

What would it look like if there were real and immediate consequences for men who cause an unwanted pregnancy? What kind of consequences would make sense? Should they be financial? A loss of rights or freedoms? Should they be as harsh, painful, nauseating, scarring, expensive, risky, and life-altering as forcing a woman to go through a nine-month unwanted pregnancy?

Total castration.

Sperm should be considered a dangerous bodily fluid that can cause pain, a lifetime of disruption, and even death for some.

I point that out because men could easily prevent elective abortion, which is virtually all abortion, simply by ejaculating responsibly. Men mostly run our government. Men mostly make the laws.

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.

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.

What should the legal consequences be for men who cause unwanted pregnancies?