The Other Plan B

As a professor, a writer and an editor who has contributed to various texts on sexuality, including 2013’s Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power and 2015’s New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics and the Law, I receive many unsolicited e-mails from men filled with provocative subject matter, confessions about private proclivities and various forms of the question “Am I normal?” When it comes to pornography specifically, men are eager to share their experiences and opinions. But when it comes to consent or sexual assault? Crickets. The same goes for the subject of abortion.

I’ve recently been posing a question to my male friends, and I’d like to ask PLAYBOY’s male readers the same: Have you thought about abortion lately? You know, the one your girlfriend had in high school? Or maybe the woman was your fiancée, and her family was conservative and religious? Has a one-night stand (what was her name again?) ever texted you, asking for $300? Do you know for certain whether any of the women in your family have had abortions?

If you’re a man, odds are you haven’t had to spend much time reflecting on the personal benefits of abortion, including the numerous ways in which women’s access to the safe and (for now) legal procedure enhances your life. Not giving much consideration to abortion, I would argue, is a double privilege of benefiting from abortion yet not being expected to talk about it. There’s no #ShoutYourAbortion campaign for men on Instagram and no #YouKnowMe hashtag wielded by male activists on Twitter. When journalist Liz Plank asked men to describe their experiences with abortion on Twitter in May 2019, she received only a smattering of disclosures among the predictable pushback from anti-choice tweeters and trolls.

As things stand, women bear the stigma for aborting and the shame of disclosing it. With abortion rights regressing in many states, women now even face scrutiny from some feminists who believe they have a duty to speak about their abortions publicly.

Men, meanwhile, benefit from this emotional labor. A man who goes through an abortion with his partner isn’t expected to defend that decision. Men are not expected to “shout” about it. Men do not have to indicate their experience with abortion on basic health forms that collect their personal medical history. Generally, physicians don’t ask men about their engagement with previous pregnancies during a medical intake, a conversation that could be an opportunity to provide accurate reproductive-health information. Nobody assumes men are whispering their abortion stories over steins of beer. Men aren’t expected to share their experiences with abortion during intimate conversations with their partners when deciding to create a family or remain child-free. Men’s freedom to evade this scrutiny? It adds up to a lot of saved mental and emotional bandwidth.

And yet, nearly one in four women terminate a pregnancy by the time they turn 45. That means as many as one in four men may have experienced abortion. Where legal, abortion services are provided to women from all walks of life, all incomes and all religions. Fifty-nine percent of services are provided to women who are already mothers. While bodily integrity and the right to privacy are core to many legal debates (with the latter being the basis of Roe v. Wade)—and while the decision to terminate a pregnancy must remain the right of women whose bodies are affected—behind nearly every abortion stands a man. That raises a question: Why is one of the greatest human rights battles of our generation a gendered issue? And why aren’t we as a society doing more to include men in the fight?

“Legal access to abortion services undoubtedly benefits any man whose sexual partner wants an abortion and safely receives one.”

For one, it may be because men’s experience with abortion is both understudied and underreported. Katie Watson, author of the 2018 Oxford University Press book Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law and Politics of Ordinary Abortion, coined the term abortion beneficiary to describe “people who didn’t terminate a pregnancy themselves but benefited from the fact someone else did.” As Watson explains, the web of abortion beneficiaries is vast. It includes men who, given options, intentionally choose parenthood. It includes men who have enjoyed sex without worrying about contraceptive failure. It includes men who haven’t had to parent grandchildren when their son or daughter couldn’t. It includes men who have gone on to pursue degrees and professions, and who have earned income and built wealth, because of a decision made by a girlfriend, wife or sexual partner years before.

Researchers at the University of Utah recently collected self-reported data from men who experienced a pregnancy with a partner while under the age of 20 and compared the outcomes of those who became fathers with those who were abortion beneficiaries. Their findings, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2019, concluded that young men who avoided becoming teen fathers through abortion access had stronger educational futures. Twenty-two percent of men who were abortion beneficiaries went on to graduate from college, compared with only six percent of teen fathers, for example.

Of course, people should be able to have kids at the legal age—and be supported in doing so—notes the study’s lead researcher, Bethany G. Everett. But our society and government don’t do a good job of supporting new parents, teenaged or older. Neither do we do a good job of promoting maternal health and preventing neonatal death. Georgia consistently ranks among the worst in maternal mortality rates, with half the counties in the state having no ob-gyns. States with the highest rates of infant mortality—Ohio, Alabama and Mississippi, to name a few—have passed some of the country’s most restrictive abortion bans. Women who are denied access to abortion are four times more likely to have incomes below the federal poverty level six months later.

What does this have to do with men’s abortion benefits? All the sons of mothers who were able to choose the timing of their pregnancies received benefits to their health and well-being from the moment they were born, no matter the subsequent circumstances of their childhood.

This should not be misconstrued as justification for men to coerce women into having abortions. Rather, the research highlights that “restricting access to abortion may have negative consequences for men whose partners desire abortion but are unable to access services,” according to Everett and her team. Stated from a different angle, legal access to abortion services undoubtedly benefits any man whose sexual partner wants an abortion and safely receives one.

Abortion has existed for thousands of years, but its ties to the societal control of women’s bodies is more recent. From the 1600s through the early 1800s, abortion was not criminalized in America. This changed when male physicians began opposing abortions performed by nonphysicians, such as midwives, female healers and wise women who threatened male doctors’ control over the medical industry. The procedure became even more controversial when newspapers started advertising abortion preparations in the mid-1800s. Abortion then turned into a moral issue—not because of disagreement over when life begins but because a still-puritanical society worried women would take advantage of abortion services to cover up extramarital affairs. By the early 1900s almost all 50 states had passed anti-abortion laws.

A century later, a stark gap between reality and the rhetoric of men who oppose abortion pervades the national debate over female reproductive health. Sixty-one percent of men say it should be legal in all or most cases, yet the most vocal anti-abortion legislators and pro-life activists—those who are part of what Rolling Stone’s Jamil Smith has termed “the forced-birth movement”—are also men.

They include many Republican politicians who have gone to great lengths to eradicate abortion access while privately benefiting from it, such as Scott Lloyd, former head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In 2004, as a law student, Lloyd wrote a paper comparing abortion to the Holocaust. According to Mother Jones, classmates recall this paper as “a manifesto,” as if Lloyd were on a crusade. Since then, he has attempted to block a 17-year-old rape victim from obtaining an abortion and promoted crisis pregnancy centers, which are merely fronts for anti-choice activism. But as Mother Jones reported in 2018, a younger Lloyd once drove an ex-girlfriend to terminate a pregnancy for which he was responsible.

Republican congressman Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, who co-sponsored a 20-week abortion ban, resigned in 2017 after news broke that he allegedly had pressured his mistress to terminate a pregnancy. U.S. Representative Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee, a former physician, proudly claims a 100 percent pro-life voting record yet has supported two abortions for his ex-wife and reportedly pressured a 24-year-old patient—his mistress—to terminate her pregnancy. November 2010 Playmate Shera Bechard sued Elliott Broidy, a former deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee and one of California’s top Republican Party fundraisers, for allegedly failing to make good on a $1.6 million cover-up of their extramarital affair and, purportedly, an abortion.

These gentlemen had, in their minds, legitimate reasons for aborting a pregnancy; think “for therapeutic reasons” or “because the relationship wasn’t going well.” Their reasons may feel legitimate and deeply personal to them, but they are not unique. Such benefits are in fact among the reasons many people are staunchly pro-choice.

Given that research proves men benefit from abortion access, it’s reasonable to expect men’s engagement and political solidarity with pro-choice policy making. This is all the more pressing with the U.S. Supreme Court’s inevitable review of Roe v. Wade. (The reversal of Roe could mean that “men go to college while women go to jail,” Everett comments.) For the abortion-rights movement to result in true policy reform, and to maintain ongoing federal decriminalization, it must keep women at the center of the issue while also developing a broader focus on abortion as a non-gendered human rights issue.

The good news is that some male-led efforts to support abortion rights are under way. The MenEngage Alliance, for example, has partnered with the Sexual Rights Initiative to advance global human rights related to sexuality through advocacy with the United Nations. Men for Women’s Choice, a decentralized grassroots network of male allies, encourages men around the world to support women’s liberation efforts. The group explains, “All humans should have the right to autonomy and bodily integrity. For women and men, this often means the same thing, but for women it has an additional meaning: the ability to make choices regarding whether she will bear a child. We believe that no man should be able to force a woman to bear a child she does not want.”

While strong forces are at work to preserve male power and advantage, anti-sexist men must continue to work against the tide and help cut through the myths and fallacies used to further women’s political repression. Both forced abortion and denial of access are tools used by abusive men, according to researchers from the Guttmacher Institute and the UC Davis School of Medicine, who found that among women with a history of interpersonal violence, 74 percent experienced various forms of male control to influence their pregnancy outcome.

Galvanizing men in abortion rights politics makes sense. Women already carry the emotional and political labor around abortion rights, as well as the stigma for accessing the procedure. Women do the majority of heavy lifting to maintain access to reproductive options and sexual health care. But abortion is not a woman’s issue. It is everyone’s issue.

Something else to consider, if we wanted to flip the script: Anti-abortion legislation is nothing more than a penalty for having sex for both genders. It’s terrifying, yes, but it’s a reality more men might want to think about.