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.

Most times when a woman has sex, she cannot be impregnated because her egg is not fertile. Every time a man has sex, he can potentially impregnate someone, because he is always fertile.

As one fertility doctor I spoke with said, “Tracking signs of fertility is really good if you’re trying to get pregnant, but because ovulation can skip or delay without giving you external signs to track, it’s not good at preventing pregnancy and is ABSOLUTELY not recommended to be used as birth control.”

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.

Again: If women are expected to learn how to use their birth control correctly, the same can be expected of men.

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.

and observations. I honor and believe each one. But here’s the thing, vasectomies are always performed with at least a local anesthetic, while pain meds are rarely if ever used for IUD insertions.

When the choice is between maximizing men’s pleasure or minimizing women’s pain, society will predictably choose men.

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.

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.

unwanted pregnancies will ever occur unless a man ejaculates irresponsibly in her body.

Men cause all unwanted pregnancies.

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. A woman’s consent to sex does not force a man to ejaculate in her vagina.

We, men and women, have a huge blind spot when it comes to men and birth control.

Men assume women will do all the work of pregnancy prevention, that a woman will take responsibility for her own body and for the man’s body, and women assume women will do it, too.

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.

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.

Asking men to take some responsibility is not the same as allowing women to take no responsibility.

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.

society is set up to protect men from the consequences of their own actions.