Men Can Prevent Unintended Pregnancy, Too

By Brian Nguyen, RH Reality Check. Posted February 18, 2008.

Finding himself faced with his partner's unplanned pregnancy, today's man may well be confronted for the first time with a situation in which his opinions and beliefs carry less weight than those of his female partner. In absence of a critical day-to-day assessment of their gender-based privilege and power, privileged men rarely find themselves pushed to recognize the negative effects of their power on the lives of others. So when men create an anti-abortion movement that turns a woman's decision to have an abortion into a story of male victimization and loss of fatherhood, their reaction is understandable -- and even predictable.

But the men who claim that they have been victimized by abortion were not powerless to prevent their circumstances. When a couple uses contraception, they make an implicit agreement that they are not ready to be pregnant. For a man to not be ready to face these decisions, have unprotected sex, and then be upset with his partner for having obtained an abortion and deprived him of his reproductive rights is totally contradictory.

These arguments should in no way delegitimize the suffering that men may feel. Abortion can be a difficult experience, but it is one that women should always have the choice to make. No, men cannot have the final say on their partners' decisions. But they can assert their ability to be knowledgeable and supportive both before and after an abortion. Men can spread a positive message of partnership in decision-making. Masculinity does not have to entail a man making the final decisions in a relationship and giving up his personal aspirations to care for his child. Instead, being strong can mean that a man is willing to discuss family planning with his partner so that when pregnancy occurs, it will be intended, and he will be ready to support the family that he helped to create.

Reproductive responsibility has long been considered to be a woman's task -- but men are deeply affected by the pregnancy-related decisions women make. Abortion decisions have been considered anecdotally to affect the social, emotional, and physical health of men, especially when men are not considered valuable enough to even hear about the decision making process. As seen from November's "Reclaiming Fatherhood" conference in San Francisco, California, which gathered more than a hundred grief-stricken men who had been directly or indirectly involved in abortions, men do want to play a larger part in reproductive decision making -- even if they intend to allow only one option to women and therefore no decision at all. We can sympathize for men who have not had the opportunity to show a more compassionate and supportive side such that their partners would have more likely noticed their potential to both be helpful husbands and unfailing fathers, but we cannot overlook the fact that these sensitivities among men are late in coming. The majority of men seem to want to become part of pregnancy decisions only after having had unprotected sex, and without ever having previously considered their partners' desires to be pregnant with their genetic offspring -- or to be pregnant at all.

Male Involvement in Birth Control and Family Planning

Can men be blamed for sitting back and letting women take the lead in handling birth control? Biology has never forced men to bear the consequences of pregnancy. Nor has our society also asked men to shoulder this burden. The 2005 Debt Reductions Act reduced federal funding for state-run child support enforcement agencies -- so men have been with even fewer reasons to be sexually and socially responsible. Meanwhile, the Child Support Protection Act of 2007 has stalled. But even the paternalistic US government is not solely to blame for men playing too small a part in the prevention of unplanned pregnancy. Medical research has been slow to provide contraceptive options for men and because many men assume that women have already secured a birth control method of their own, they have not demanded them for themselves. Current options that men have to prevent pregnancy are limited to condoms, periodic abstinence, withdrawal, and vasectomy -- and these options are woefully inadequate, when compared to options available to women. Yet even if there existed a better birth control option for men, the difficulties public health organizations have had convincing men to use condoms belie a more desperate situation, in which, for many men, possible consequences of sexual activity are considered only after sex takes place.

But men can do better and women should expect this of them. One simple and very concrete way men can take more responsibility for reproductive health and family planning has been made possible by the FDA approval of over-the-counter provision of emergency contraception.

Male Access to Emergency Contraception

If ever there was a perfect time for men to band together against a loss of fatherhood, that time is now -- with their demand for access to emergency contraception. Those who feel that they have been hurt by abortion have more reason than anyone else to spread knowledge of Plan B and support its widespread provision to men.

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Brian Nguyen is currently a medical student in his second year at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a coordinator of the university's chapter of the Medical Students for Choice, a group dedicated to resolving the nation's shortage of abortion providers through the destigmatization and inclusion of abortion in medical school education.

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