Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion

by Gabrielle Stanley Blair

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.

So let’s do the math. 24,208 divided by 480 . . . carry the 4 . . . and it turns out that compared to women, men have a little more than fifty times the number of fertile days.

Every time a man has sex, he can potentially impregnate someone, because he is always fertile.

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.

Ovulation happens approximately monthly without resulting in pregnancy.

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.

condoms have double superpowers—they can prevent pregnancy, and they can prevent sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Women’s birth control options do not have that same STI-fighting superpower. What condoms don’t have is a list of side effects. They don’t cause depression, mood swings, blood clots, liver failure, weight gain, acne, strokes, or anything else on the list of side effects for hormonal birth control.

Working toward making vasectomies and reversals a common and reliable birth control option for every man is a worthwhile goal. Of course, if reversal success is a worry, men can always bank their sperm before the vasectomy.

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. Let me say that again: 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.

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. Not a public health

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.

Men are always fertile. They never have to guess if it’s a fertile day; they know it is. They are a loaded gun at all times. 2) The man is 1,000 percent in the best position to either prevent or cause a pregnancy due to simple human physiology. 3) Condoms and vasectomies are easier, cheaper, safer, simpler, and more convenient than birth control options for women.

need to drill home the fact that men are fertile every single day. Men are essentially walking around with a dangerous weapon, not a plaything. How they manage their sperm has life and death consequences. To the extent we have not underscored the grave reality of that fact, we have seriously failed men and women.