Men Are 100% Responsible for Unwanted Pregnancies Gabrielle Blair on Her Viral-Tweet-Turned-Book ' Ejaculate Responsibly' HEAD TOPICS

Men Are 100% Responsible for Unwanted Pregnancies Gabrielle Blair on Her Viral-Tweet-Turned-Book ' Ejaculate Responsibly'

10/22/2022 9:39:00 PM

I d like to see the conversation shift from women s bodies to what men can do to prevent pregnancy says @designmom author of Ejaculate Responsibly A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion

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Ms Magazine

“I’d like to see the conversation shift from women’s bodies to what men can do to prevent pregnancy,” says designmom, author of Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion. It’s time to rethink how we talk about abortion. Gabrielle Blair, a Morman woman and mother of six, argues that the onus of preventing unwanted pregnancies should fall to those who cause them: men. Gabrielle Blair:September 13, 2018It was my very first thread. I had never really used Twitter for anything other than promoting blog posts. That changed during the election. I had written this piece about abortion, but I wasn’t sure where to put it on my blog. It was a little angrier maybe than other things I had written. I sat on it until the Kavanaugh hearings, which was politician after politician grandstanding about abortion. None of them cared or knew anything about abortion. It was just so maddening. So I decided to publish that thread and it went viral instantly.  Read more:
Ms. Magazine » In Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair Makes Abortion a Men’s Issue Teen girls sexually assaulted while going to school in 2 separate cases, Philadelphia police say One-Punch Man, Mob Psycho 100 Creator Will Release New Manga Bryson Stott Gets NLCS Tickets for Phillies Fan Who Lost Dad to Cancer

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CNN's Michael Smerconish speaks with New York Magazine writer Reeves Wiedeman about the true story that inspired the Netflix series 'The Watcher.' Read more >> In Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair Makes Abortion a Men’s IssueIn a dire post–Roe v. Wade climate, Gabrielle Blair's new book 'Ejaculate Responsibly' argues that abortion is a men's issue. Iranians are in 5th week of protests against its IR’s regime. We’ve lost hundreds of kids, teenagers and young adults. This will NOT stop till the world hears us and the purpose behind our cries. help stop the IR’s human rights violations. join us in making history. MahsaAmini Prevention is *not* a new way to think about abortion. We need to keep having hard conversations about abortion. If all men ejaculated responsibly we still need legal abortions. No questions asked. We also need to keep having conversations about prevention that include men. Teen girls sexually assaulted while going to school in 2 separate cases, Philadelphia police sayIt's not yet known if the same man was responsible for both attacks or if different suspects are responsible for each case. Is that Michele Obama's relative. I see similarities PA4TAXPAYERS I just finished being horrified by the one such assault that I read about, and now I see a second one. This is beyond comprehension that people elect politicians who say and do nothing for reasons I will never agree with. PA4TAXPAYERS Love how this action news station never covers the real problem in the city. Maybe you should be at the door of PhillyMayor One-Punch Man, Mob Psycho 100 Creator Will Release New MangaOne-Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100 remain two beloved anime franchises thanks to the stories [...] i never got to see 1 episode of OnePunchMan i seen video skits of vs's and stuff but this animation to me looks Nickelodeon cringy , didnt motivate me to watch full episodes . nihilistbluees Bryson Stott Gets NLCS Tickets for Phillies Fan Who Lost Dad to CancerAfter seeing a viral tweet about a Phils fan who traveled to San Diego and honored his father who died from cancer, Phillies shortstop Bryson Stott got him tickets to the NLCS. JClarkNBCS bryson_stott10 Awesome! JClarkNBCS bryson_stott10 W bryson_stott10 JClarkNBCS Love this Bradley Beal delivers late, lifts Wizards over Bulls in home openerBeal is surrounded by more weapons this season, but when the Wizards needed a basket, they turned to their all-star in a 102-100 win over Chicago. Wife may have been living with husband's remains for months, sheriff saysSheriff Ed Gonzalez tweeted the details involving a family's welfare check at a relative's home that turned grim. in conversations around birth control.Emily Chan beauty By Calin Van Paris I started exploring, Okay, well, what about men’s birth control? Why aren’t more men getting vasectomies or at the very least using a condom? That’s not a big ask.The most recent attack happened around 7:45 a.One-Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100 remain two beloved anime franchises thanks to the stories following Saitama and Mob fit to bursting with action-packed battles that are considered by many to be the best brawls in the history of the medium.    I sat down with Blair to discuss her journey from viral tweet to publishing a book.  Steph Black:   Tell me about yourself and what brought you here. You don’t need to wear one if you’re not gonna have sex that day. Gabrielle Blair: My background is in graphic design. According to police, a 13-year-old girl exited the subway at Broad and Race streets and was approached by a man who indicated he had a gun. I started a blog in 2006 called DesignMom about the intersection of parenting and design—and believe it or not, it’s still going! That little intersection allowed me to write about anything I wanted, and that means I can even write about abortion. You really highlight this disparity: how much of the burden is on women versus men, despite how much easier it is for men to prevent pregnancy— …And how much more fertile they are! They’re fertile from puberty till death. That surprises some people if they’ve only known me for my house tours or recipes. While Mob's story came to an end with the conclusion of his manga series, Saitama's story continues as One-Punch Man is still releasing new chapters, even with the fight between the hard-hitting protagonist and Garou already ending in an explosive conclusion. But I was always writing about current events and political things that I was talking to my own children about. Ovulation is completely unpredictable. The man then walked with the girl as she went to school. I’m a mother of six, and a Mormon. I have a good understanding of arguments surrounding abortion, religious and otherwise. I dog-eared number nine: “We expect women to do the work of pregnancy prevention. I've been listening to men grandstand about women's reproductive rights, and I'm convinced men actually have zero interest in stopping abortion. Thursday. Here's why… — Gabrielle Blair (@designmom) September 13, 2018 Black: Your book really started with a viral tweet thread back in 2018 when you wrote that men were responsible for 100 percent of unplanned pregnancies. I’ve thought about this a lot. What has the journey been like from that tweet to this book? Blair: It was my very first thread. I had never really used Twitter for anything other than promoting blog posts. This was just on women because women are physically pregnant. That's when, police say, the suspect took the girl to an area below a staircase and attempted to sexually assault her. That changed during the election. I had written this piece about abortion, but I wasn’t sure where to put it on my blog. You start thinking about male physiology. It was a little angrier maybe than other things I had written. However, even after the attack was stopped, police say the suspect continued following the girl out onto the street. I sat on it until the Kavanaugh hearings, which was politician after politician grandstanding about abortion. Every time a man has sex, every time, he could cause a pregnancy. None of them cared or knew anything about abortion. It was just so maddening. It’s insane, and it’s this thing that any couple can testify [to]: It improves your sex life. "My detectives are working leads as we speak," Kearney said. So I decided to publish that thread and it went viral instantly.  Overwhelmingly, the response was positive. Do you think women have internalized that it’s our job to handle birth control so much so that we don’t even push back against that expectation? Oh, one hundred percent. I had been sitting on the thread for six months or so, so in my mind, these ideas were old." In both cases, police say the victims notified people at school about the attacks. But they were new ideas for a lot of the people. It’s hard to see because we’re swimming in it. I was hearing from really progressive women that they never thought about these things, and now they’re suddenly having conversations with their partners about vasectomy or the realities of birth control’s side effects. There were women crying to me saying they didn’t know someone could share this burden with them.” We’ve got an $8 billion birth-control industry, 90% of which is purchases by women for women. Copyright © 2022 WPVI-TV.  It was also really amazing to hear from so many men for whom it just clicked . You can see in the comments of the thread that they’re mentally going through their past sexual experiences thinking, Oh crap, was I ejaculating irresponsibly? Was I choosing my own few seconds of pleasure over her body? You can see that they’ll go into their next sexual experience more responsibly, more aware of what’s at risk. And of course you’re not doing that.  And the thread has been retweeted every day for four years, sometimes thousands of times a day, because abortion is in the news.  So I’ve had four years of arguing this point, exploring it and explaining it to people who might not understand it. It just makes it so clear. I’m going, Okay, let me try and rephrase this. Let me come up with another story. It’s so clear that the anti-abortion crowd doesn’t actually care. Let me get another example.  Right after the tweet went viral, I was approached by a bunch of publishers that wanted to turn it into a book. They do not actually care if someone has an abortion that’s on their team or is their candidate. And I couldn’t see it. Then someone posed the question to me, If Twitter had an edit button, would you change anything about the thread? Immediately I said yes. The book makes that irrefutable: If someone wants there to be no abortions, great, we actually know how to reduce abortions. I know where people get stuck. I know where there’s new updated data, where the link I shared no longer works. It’s free and easily available birth control. That was this trigger for me to write the book—I know how to explain and expand on my tweets. I sat on it until the Kavanaugh hearings, which was politician after politician grandstanding about abortion. What do men need to do to be in this fight and start to decentralize reproductive health as a women’s issue? I hope this book helps facilitate that conversation. None of them cared or knew anything about abortion. It was just so maddening. Like, hey, women have been taking birth control, paying for birth control, dealing with the side effects of birth control, and you haven’t had to worry about it, but you were enjoying the benefits of her work. So I decided to publish that thread and it went viral instantly.  Black : What was it like to actually turn a viral Tweet thread into a book? Blair : I was hesitant at first. So step up. I guess because I write about so much and this is such a specific topic that I wondered if it meant I could only ever write about abortion again. I finally I decided I wasn’t waiting anymore. [Men] are better positioned physically to prevent a pregnancy than any woman.  We did a lot of back and forth to figure out what was going to be most effective. I landed on wanting to do a book that you can read really quickly, that if you if you are trying to remember something from it, you can find it really quickly. That is 100% on you as a man. I wanted a really usable, easy to read book. I didn’t want this to be an academic book, even though I’m talking about serious things and linking to serious sources. We’re not asking them to do anything difficult in any way. And inexpensive. I want someone to have this in their back pocket. Do not let your sperm get by an egg. It’s easy to buy a copy in and share it. You read it, you hand it on to someone else. Maybe there’s a future book that’s longer.  Black : The thesis of this book is really in Lesson 13, that men are the cause of and responsible for all unwanted pregnancies. How did you come up with that? What triggered that specific argument? Blair: I was reading statistics in probably early 2018 of how many abortions there had been that year and the numbers surprised me. They were higher than I thought and I was like, Why am I surprised by this?  I feel in my core that women are very aware and careful of their bodies. There’s a sense from women that we’re not eager to get medical procedures like abortions. So why are we having so many? Then immediately I was like, Oh, I know why. I know exactly why. Birth control is super hard. And I was saying this as someone who had six babies and got to choose when to have them because I use birth control.  But I hated birth control. I hated it. I would have mood swings, I would have breakouts. I hated the maintenance. Besides what it was doing to my body, I had all these young kids. How am I supposed to go to get a yearly exam, just for birth control? I had little kids and was moving a lot, I needed a new doctor, my insurance was changing and I would have to start the process of getting a prescription all over again. It was such a pain. But It works. So that part I didn’t hate.   We don’t ever talk about that—we act like it’s super easy, like I’m just going to stop at the pharmacy and pick up my BandAids, Neosporin, Ibuprofen and a pack of birth control pills.  So why would we have abortions when we don’t like medical procedures? Because birth control is awful for a lot of women. Inaccessible, too expensive, it’s not great on the body.  Well then I thought, What can men do with this? I was like, Oh, condoms!  The contrast was so clear. Condoms are free. There are programs for free condoms in literally every state or just drop by a local clinic. Condoms are in vending machines, 24 hours a day, no prescription needed. You don’t have to ingest them every day. If you’re not gonna have sex that day, you don’t need to wear one. For birth control, you’re absorbing those hormones every day, whether you’re having sex or not. Condoms don’t have side effects.  Then I realized, Oh, I know why men don’t use condoms. Men hate condoms.  So that’s what got me to exploring these topics which became that thread.  The contrast was so clear. Condoms are free. There are programs for free condoms in literally every state or just drop by a local clinic. Condoms are in vending machines, 24 hours a day, no prescription needed. Black : You wrote this book really calling on men to step up. How has your husband responded to this? Blair: He’s probably my biggest advocate. He calls himself my first convert. He got it immediately. He was looking at our marriage going, Whoa, why did I wait to get a vasectomy? By the time I wrote this, he’s had a vasectomy for years. He was like, I wasn’t really aware of the side effects, I wasn’t aware of how difficult it was for my wife get the birth control, I wasn’t supporting that and I should have been. I could have made the appointments for her, I could have made it so she doesn’t have to take off work, or I could have arranged childcare.   I say this in the thread, you think women would be mad at men about this, but none of us were taught to think about this. So I can’t be mad at him because I wasn’t thinking about it either. This is a cultural phenomenon. Black What do you think men should be taking from this book?  Blair : I’d like to see the conversation shift from women’s bodies to what men can do to prevent pregnancy. Men can cause pregnancy every time they have sex but they can’t get pregnant. A woman’s orgasm has never caused a pregnancy, it can’t impregnate anyone. Ovulation is involuntary. Ejaculation, and the location of that ejaculation, is always voluntary.  Black : How does shifting the burden of pregnancy prevention from women to men factor into the conversation around abortion?  Blair : As far as the abortion conversation goes, my argument takes the emotion out of it. So many people want to debate me on when life begins and when it’s murder. These are philosophical and religious conversations. We’re not going to agree on that. I’m going to be pro-choice and I’m going to say I trust a woman to decide when she wants to be a parent or if she doesn’t want to be a parent at all. I trust her to end that pregnancy. If we talk about prevention , it removes all that emotion. You and I haven’t talked about babies at all during this conversation because we haven’t needed to. Because there is no baby because the man ejaculated responsibly! We have solved the question of abortion because there was no baby to murder.  Nothing abortion opponents are arguing for is actually reducing abortions. We know how to prevent pregnancies and if we prevent pregnancies, abortions go down. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.   I’ve experienced pregnancy and I did not enjoy it, even though I chose it. It was the hardest thing my body has done. I would love to see the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions go down because that means that someone who didn’t want to experience pregnancy is not having to experience it.  If abortions go down, it would also signal that men are not treating women’s bodies so casually. It’s a big deal to ejaculate inside someone else’s body. They should understand the damage their sperm can cause. If the number of abortions go down, I take that as a signal that men are maybe contemplating how their actions affect women.  Though I hope abortion remains legal. I want it to be legal. I want anyone who needs or wants an abortion to get an abortion. But I would be so delighted to see men stop causing unwanted pregnancies so that women didn’t have to even make the choice in the first place.  I think men can handle it. I’ve experienced pregnancy and I did not enjoy it, even though I chose it. It was the hardest thing my body has done. Black : Switching gears a little bit, I’m also from a minority religion. I’m Jewish and I know you’re Mormon. I don’t know about you, but I often encounter people who are surprised to learn that Judaism is a very pro-choice religion and in some cases, not only permits abortion, but requires it to save the life of the pregnant person. How do people respond to you being Mormon and pro-choice?   Blair: I love this question. Yes, I’m a Mormon. Yes, I’m pro-choice and I’m very comfortable identifying as both of those things. But I know people will make assumptions about my views when they I hear I’m Mormon. I try to use it to my advantage. It allows me to discuss this topic with people with very conservative opinions in a way that they wouldn’t normally be able to.  In my thread, I start with the fact that I’m a mother of six and I’m a Mormon. That was very intentional. I wouldn’t say Mormonism is even one of my top identities, but I knew it would be useful to include because people would be more likely to read the whole thread. Some people think my argument is actually stronger because I’m from a conservative religion and  because I have six kids. They see I’m obviously pro-having kids and I’m not trying to stop people from having families.  Not all Mormons would agree with me, but I study our doctrine and I feel like it fits very neatly with abortion. I have no issues being both pro-choice and Mormon. U.S. democracy is at a dangerous inflection point—from the demise of abortion rights, to a lack of pay equity and parental leave, to skyrocketing maternal mortality, and attacks on trans health. 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