No, Men Don't Cause 100% of Unwanted Pregnancies
ICYMI: Let's clear up some confusion and pseudoscientific nonsense that's been sweeping Medium.com for a few years
ICYMI: I wrote this for Medium in June of last 2022 and I felt it deserved to be republished here. Over the last few years, there’s been a wave of pseudoscientific nonsense floating around that displaces the abortion question. It shifts the focus away from the religious conservative movements who are driving anti-choice sentiment and towards men. There are numerous reasons this is flawed, worst of all being the pseudoscience and outright misrepresentations contained in the article.
Both
and I have done thorough takedowns of this line of thinking.It’s important that we recognize what Dr. Nicole Prause, Ph.D. called “strange bedfellows” here on The Science of Sex podcast, as religious movements that are patently anti-sex and aggressively against women’s rights continue to target feminists with propaganda to try to make inroads with the wider mainstream culture.
Why is this happening?
Because there is a little bit of overlap between the religious anti-sex agenda and the sexual frustration of women, even progressive feminists. If they can tap into the sexual frustration of women they can redirect our attention away from the assault on women’s rights, then they can shove their agenda through with impunity.
As a vasectomized man—one who thinks that all men who don’t want children should get vasectomized—I’m here to say vasectomy isn’t a sufficient replacement for women’s reproductive care, which is what’s implied in the article.
Anyways, here’s my refutation.
Since the bombshell leak from the Supreme Court clarified in great detail the court’s intention to overturn Roe V. Wade, something that will cause a cascade effect and trigger outright abortion bans in many states, an old article from 2018 has been making its rounds again.
Which story is that? You probably know the one. I’ve had a few people send it to me after reading it, overjoyed that they finally have a perpetrator they can sink their teeth into — men.
The story is by Gabrielle Blair and it’s titled Men Cause 100% of Unwanted Pregnancies.While I agree with some portions of the article, it contains numerous inaccuracies and plenty of bad advice.
It’s been sent to me by a number of pro-choice women who feel it represents their views. I hate to say it, but it’s not quite the pro-choice argument they think it is, so much as anti-man (and, ironically, anti-choice).
Carlyn Beccia wrote an excellent criticism of the piece that I’ll feature at the bottom of this story. I won’t beat the same path she already has, so I’d like to hit these issues head-on with unique data and my own point of view.
The fact that two of us could come up with lengthy, detailed pieces refuting the article says it all.
What Do Men Believe?
Taking it from the top, Gabrielle says:
As a mother of six and a Mormon, I have a good understanding of arguments surrounding abortion, religious and otherwise. When I hear men discussing women’s reproductive rights, I’m often left with the thought that they have zero interest in stopping abortion.
If you want to prevent abortion, you need to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Men seem unable (or unwilling) to admit that they cause 100% of them.
This starts off with a few loaded premises. They’re erroneous assumptions. The first is the assumption that the few men Gabrielle has listened to talk about women’s reproductive rights are representative of the whole.
Men have diverse views about abortion and the majority of them believe it should be legal under most or all circumstances. More men than women believe abortion should be legal in most polls, with a few exceptions, according to data from Gallup Polls.
Pew Research conducted in 2021 found that the majority of men think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Even a majority of Catholics think abortion should be legal in most or all cases.
Religion and Its Discontents
Research published by Pew Research in 2022 found:
While women are slightly more likely than men to say abortion should be legal in all cases with no exceptions (21% vs. 17%), large majorities of both women (68%) and men (74%) say there are some cases where abortion should be legal and others where it should be illegal.
What’s driving the anti-abortion sentiment is mostly Evangelical Christians. I’ve covered this extensively right here.
77% of white Evangelicals think abortion should be illegal in all or almost all cases and 21% think it should be legal in all or almost all cases.
54% of Protestants believe abortion should be illegal in all or almost all cases while 44% believe it should be legal in all or almost all cases.
Of Catholics, 43% believe it should be illegal and 55% believe it should be legal in all or almost all cases. Then there are men…
42% of men believe abortion should be illegal and 56% think it should be legal in most or all cases. And women?
37% believe it should be illegal and 62% think it should be legal in most or all cases.
Which demographic do you think is most responsible for the anti-abortion fervor going on in politics right now? Exactly.
Blaming men was a smokescreen while religion made its way up to the highest court in the land and is now about to transform the landscape of women’s healthcare.
The elephant in the living room, here, is the fact that Gabrielle is a self-avowed Mormon. I don’t think it’s an accident that considering the Mormon Church is against abortion in almost all circumstances, the focus of the article is on “male ejaculatory irresponsibility” rather than the importance of reproductive rights and holding the Church accountable for intrusions on women’s reproductive rights.
To quote the Church itself:
Mormon beliefs teach that all of life comes from God. He is the literal Father of our spirits. The ability to create life on earth is a sacred responsibility, and therefore, Mormons are opposed to abortion in all but a very few limited circumstances.
Ironically, the Mormon Church thrusts the responsibility right back into the lap of the mother:
This is one reason abortion is permitted in cases of rape-the woman’s right to choose what would happen to her body was stolen from her. However, when a child is created through voluntary actions on the part of the mother, another body and other lives are involved. The woman’s right to choose happened when she chose to be intimate.
In other words, don’t have sex and if you do have sex, you get what you deserve. Anti-abortion sentiment thrives when people feel there should be punishments for women having sex.
Pew Research Center lists the LDS Church (Mormons) as being among the staunchest anti-abortion churches in the country.
Gabrielle’s article is a classic example of a red herring. It deflects blame away from the religious communities who are strongly pushing the anti-abortion narrative and ramming laws down our throats by putting the blame for unwanted pregnancy on men.
It’s just as bad when religious extremists do this with women.
Whether they blame a man or woman, it’s unconstructive and the goal is to distract us from why we need women’s reproductive rights.
Why Do Women Want to Ban Abortion?
As
says in response to the same article, some research has shown that more women than men want abortion to be illegal. Carlyn theorized this is because women want to “punish” one another for their sexual escapades.It’s a tale as old as time: control sex in your surroundings to make sure your genes aren’t overrun by people who reproduce in greater numbers. This is why men established harems, this is why leaders conquered continents, and it’s why in archaic societies, women often practice infanticide.
The Science of Sex
Gabrielle then argues that men are fertile 365 days per year while women are only fertile a few days per month. This is reductive to the point of disfigurement.
When it comes to humans having sex, it’s almost a law of nature that women do the choosing and men are chosen. This dynamic influences everything about our sexual lives. It’s why men are (on average) more sexually indiscriminate than women (and women more selective).
Part of that selectivity is biological. Women get pregnant and have to carry a baby around for nine months. They have to risk death in childbirth, something men never have to even think about.
It makes sense for women, and their bodies, to be much pickier about whom they have sex with —especially when it comes to having children:
Women don’t automatically keep every egg that’s fertilized by sperm. Miscarriages sometimes happen when a woman’s body senses genetic defects in the pregnancy or the genes in the sperm aren’t up to par.
Women’s bodies automatically flush the sperm of male partners when their bodies deem the genes unfit for babymaking.
Professor Sarah Robertson of the University of Adelaide is an expert in this field. She conducts research into how male seminal fluid contains “signaling molecules” that inform women on whether they should keep or dispose of the insemination.
A protein called TLR4 signals the components of the seminal fluid (to a woman) and a woman’s body takes it from there.
If you’re thinking, “Well, women don’t really have a conscious choice in this matter,” that’s exactly the point. Neither do men when it comes to pre-ejaculate or other accidental means of getting women pregnant.
Trust me, men aren’t out there begging to spend eighteen years paying child support after being treated like a villain in family court.
What About Male Birth Control?
Gabrielle also pokes fun at male birth control studies that were withdrawn because of side effects. She notes that the side effect profile for men was not as long as it was for women and thus she implies that men are basically big babies:
To be clear, this list of side effects was about one-third as long as the known side effects for commonly used women’s contraception. There’s a lot to unpack in that story alone. I’ll simply point out that, as a society, we really don’t mind if women suffer, physically or mentally, as long as it makes things easier for men.
Here’s the problem. I’ve extensively covered the difficulties in creating a male birth control here. I’ll keep it short and sweet.
During the male trials, the most common side effect was acne. If you stopped reading here, it almost seems like a bad joke. But the other side effects were mood swings, emotional disturbances, and attempted suicide.
One guy swallowed a whole bunch of Tylenol in an effort to kill himself.
The drug studied was 1,000 mg of synthetic testosterone, and 200 mg of norethisterone enanthate injected. Lower doses of testosterone (750 mg) are given to men with deficient (extremely low) natural testosterone. But these were healthy men with normal levels of natural testosterone.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Harvard psychiatrists Harrison Pope M.D. and David Katz M.D. investigated the side effects of testosterone on healthy men.
One man bought a new sports car on credit (that he couldn’t afford) and had his friend record a video of him driving it full speed into a tree.
Another man committed armed robbery and when the cops came, he begged the police to shoot him. Both men were in a state of testosterone-induced psychosis.
A 1988 paper by Katz and Pope called Affective and psychotic symptoms associated with anabolic steroid use found that 22% of anabolic steroid users displaced affective symptoms (bipolar, depression, anxiety) while 12% experienced symptoms of outright psychosis.
Gary Wadler M.D. describes “roid rage”:
Yes. It’s been implicated in a number of murders and can result in extreme
aberrations of behavior including the taking of one’s life.
We need to ask ourselves whether the risks outweigh the benefits. The risks certainly outweigh the rewards with male birth control (besides condoms and vasectomy).
I can’t think of a single woman I know who’d want to put up with their boyfriend having psychotic breakdowns from “roid rage” all the time, jacked up on excessive testosterone.
Pull-Out Game On Point
Gabrielle sites Planned Parenthood material that says the pull-out method is effective 96% of the time if done correctly (though only 78% in practice because it’s done incorrectly).
Curiously, this means about 22% of the time, the pull-out method will fail, which is just a stone’s throw from the 28% who reported they “weren’t careful” in the German study.
She blames men for “irresponsible ejaculation” when the truth is, even if he pulls out way ahead of schedule, pre-ejaculate can still impregnate a woman.
Some studies have shown that more than 40% of men have sperm in their pre-ejaculate fluid. Some men always have sperm in their pre-ejaculate, while others never do. This always or never phenomenon probably explains why some men are successful at birth control by the withdrawal method. But the possibility of sperm in pre-ejaculate is high. The way to avoid pregnancy is to wear a condom from the first moment of genital contact.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell without testing your pre-ejaculate whether it contains sperm, so it’s a gamble. This is why we need reproductive healthcare.
Irresponsible Men & Saintly Women
Gabrielle’s article focuses on “irresponsible ejaculation” in an ironically paternalistic fashion while ignoring the basics of biology.
It reduces unwanted pregnancies to one act — a man ejaculating without caring about the consequences. But unwanted pregnancies happen as a result of many more factors than just “irresponsible ejaculation.”
A German study analyzed the reasons unplanned pregnancies happened:
39.2% reported a failure of the Knaus-Ogino method or the “calendar” method, which is when couples track the woman’s cycle and schedule their sex lives around when she’s fertile. Ironically, this is what Gabrielle highlights in her piece as the damning evidence that men cause all unwanted pregnancies, yet, it was the number one cause of unwanted pregnancies, and couples ostensibly make this decision together.
28% said they “weren’t careful” while having sex.
11.1% reported unprotected sex being the cause of their pregnancy.
10.6% reported interruption in birth control pill
2.9% reported intolerance to the pill (which caused them to stop taking it) and 2.4% reported taking the pill, but the pill failed.
Now you won’t get an argument from me against increasing accessibility to contraception. I believe it should be readily available all over the place. A 2016 study here in America showed that rates of unintended pregnancies began to decline in 2008.
Perhaps we should be investing in contraception programs (of all sorts, condoms, birth control, educational material, etc.), instead of chastising men as the sole cause of unplanned pregnancies. Small numbers of women report birth control side effects or failure as the cause of their pregnancy.
Birth Control & Vasectomies
The author paints birth control as a living hell (it can be for some women) and vasectomies as the solution. Here, I agree with the basic thrust of the argument.
Full disclosure: I’m vasectomized.
I absolutely love my vasectomy and wouldn’t trade it for the world. It’s been a real lifesaver and I can’t emphasize enough how much it’s positively impacted our sex lives. I recommend that any man who’s certain he does not want to have kids go get vasectomized so women don’t have to shoulder the agonizing side effects of hormonal birth control.
She says:
Here’s another prevention idea: All males in the U.S. could get a vasectomy when they are ready to be sexually active. Vasectomies are very safe, highly reversible, and about as invasive as a woman getting an IUD implanted. In most cases, there’s some soreness afterwards for about 24 hours, but that’s pretty much it for side effects.
While I agree that vasectomies are very safe and all I got was a bit of soreness for about a week (about 1/100th the pain of getting kicked in the nuts), the agreement stops there.
While complications are minimal, studies show that about of vasectomies have side effects, too. Vasectomy side effects are much less serious and much rarer than women’s side effects from hormonal birth control, which is why I recommend it to men who are sure they don’t want kids.
Many studies show that reversing a vasectomy isn’t as easy as she makes it sound. One key factor is the length of time between the vasectomy and the reversal. The longer the time between the vasectomy and the reversal, the less likely the reversal is to be successful.
Sorry, it’s not as simple as “have all males in the U.S. get a vasectomy when they are ready to be sexually active” and have them reversed later on. They have a shelf life, an amount of time before they’re less reversible.
Possible Solutions
There are some solutions that would help us with the problems of unplanned pregnancy and unwanted children.
Keep abortion laws in place. I know her piece was about preventing pregnancy (and thus abortion) but abortion is vital as a last resort defense for when things go wrong — and they do go wrong.
Invest in products like Vasalgel which are being developed right now. Vasalgels are gels that are to be injected into the vas tube. They block the sperm just like a vasectomy. Some research has shown this is effective for up to a year (in rabbits), but more research needs to be done, and we need to make this stuff readily available as soon as possible.
Provide easier access to contraceptives of all types, be it birth control, condoms, or whatever a person chooses to enlist.