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.

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

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.

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.

You may be surprised to learn that the way women take the Pill is unnecessarily complicated. In a piece for The Conversation called “The way you take the contraceptive pill has more to do with the Pope than your health,” Susan Walker details some of the history of the Pill, including how birth control pills simulate a menstruation schedule. How so? 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...

I’m not sure how to explain just how much women are accustomed to dealing with pain. Pain for women is normalized. Just gave birth? Take an ibuprofen. Getting an IUD? It’ll take too long to wait for an anesthetic, it’s just a little pinch, just breathe through it. It’s both misogynistic and bizarre that it is considered completely normal to perform invasive gynecological procedures with no pain management.

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.

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.

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.

In North America, one in four women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. In one study, 30 to 35 percent of men admit they would rape if they thought they could get away with it legally. In a poll of 22,000 women in Britain, 51 percent responded that they had woken to a partner having sex with them or performing sex acts on them. For many young women, violence has even become an expected part of consensual sex—if women aren’t willing to be choked or slapped or otherwise hurt, they are labeled “vanilla” and rejected.

Murder is the leading cause of death for pregnant women, often committed by the man who impregnated them.

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 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.