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It Takes Two To Tango

As a guy, it’s easy just to shrug your way around reproductive rights issues entirely. Access to clinical services, meh, contraceptives, whatever. Setting the spiritual aside, we can examine the corporeal, and that leaves us dudes even less to really consider. After all, you’re the Big Manly Man right? You’re the breadwinner, the decision-maker, the Driver of Rumbly V8s and frankly, if worse comes to worst, you don’t have to worry about carrying that child to term. Besides, getting into the nitty gritty with your wife or girlfriend about her period, sneaking into the drugstore late at night to buy tampons for her, hell even the sound of the word “slough”… I’m an anatomy major and you know, there comes a point when it’s really just the Right Time to be squeamish.

So the ladies can fight their own fight. It’s icky and emasculating and doesn’t help you reset the choke on your Wingmaster for duck season. Not YOUR problem, it’s her body, and although you are deeply for her, it’s not your place to take a stand for Her Uterus. But let’s take a step back. And then another. In fact let’s follow the rabbit hole of the Man’s Perspective On Reproductive Rights from the murky dark out into the scorching sunlit clarity of simple facts: it IS your problem, and it IS your place.

Here’s the first reason why you, as a man, need to care about reproductive rights: they are your rights too. In the state of South Carolina, it’s legal for a pharmacist to decline to fill your wife’s birth control prescription. Just because he or she feels like it! This is literally akin to having some jerk standing by your bedside table stealing all of your condoms. Somewhat more abstractly, this is like finding a Congressman’s considerable bulk wedged into the only entrance turnstile at Carowinds on the single day you manage to play hooky at work and go ride some sweet roller coasters. A woman’s freedom to control her own body results directly in her (and your!) freedom to enjoy it.

The darker, more ominous corollary to that freedom: what happens when (God forbid) your wife is raped and by the grace of some anonymous bureaucrat you are forbidden from terminating the resultant pregnancy? It’ll be great raising a criminal’s son- I hear it makes for a truly healthy marriage. Can you afford to support the child that could be conceived every single time you feel like getting frisky? Can she?

As much as someone can dispute the math, people who cannot afford to contribute to the funding of public institutions consume other peoples’ hard-earned dollars. Here’s where the tax money goes: you are paying for public schools. You are paying for roads, and public transit. You are paying for food stamps. More pressingly in 2010, you are paying for our overcrowded prisons. Every two weeks, hundreds of dollars disappear from my bank account to pay for services that I, father of none, employed and educated, never consume.

It’s cheaper to stop a pregnancy from occurring than to support an unintended one on your dime. An interesting perspective on this phenomenon came out of the London School of Economics last year. It asserts that the cheapest way to offset carbon emissions may simply be to invest in controlling the growth rate of carbon emitters. This can be quickly extrapolated to the consumption of any publicly available good or service. Responsible and sustainable approaches to childbirth are absolutely fundamental to the maintenance of our nation at large.

I don’t plan on having kids any time soon. I’m young, confused about what I want to do with my future, and stupid in love with a beautiful woman. Bringing another life into the world is the furthest thing from my mind: I’ve barely begun to enjoy my own. It takes two to dance the horizontal mambo, so for the love of all that is go-karts, beer, basketball, and lazy Sundays spent rolling around in bed, please raise your voice and your vote for reproductive rights. It’s
everyone’s issue.