It’s called birth control because someone is ‘controlling’ the birth.
There are presently 41 different types of contraception available for women, for men there are only 2 – vasectomy or a condom – your only line of defense against her ‘choice’. The only thing separating a man from a lifetime (not just 18 years) of interacting with the decider of altering the course of his life is a thin layer of latex.
Iron Rule of Tomassi #5
NEVER allow a woman to be in control of the birth.
Always have protection. I’ve had far too many guys hit me with the argument that they implicitly trust their girlfriends to be on the pill or whatever, and that she “doesn’t want kids” only to be an unprepared Daddy 9 month later after ‘the accident’. The only accident they had was not being in control of the birth themselves. In fact I’d argue that men need to use extra caution when in an LTR since the ease of getting too relaxed with her is present.
Accidental pregnancy is practically a cottage industry now. For a woman without education (or even with) and without means, an ‘unplanned’ pregnancy may be a pretty good prospect, especially when every law and social expectation weighs in her favor. These are Professional Mommies. When I counseld in Reno I knew a guy who married this woman who had 3 children from 2 Fathers who he himself had impregnated with her 4th. She was a Professional Mother.
Flush it
In 2002 the NBA issued a highly controversial and publicized warning to professional basketball players stating that players be advised to wear condoms when having sexual intercourse with women when on road games and to “flush the condom down the toilet” in order to dispose of the semen. This warning was the result of several paternity suits that year involving women these players had slept with by retrieving the condoms from the trash and ‘self-impregnanting’ themselves with the players semen. The NBA had enough occurrences of this kind to warrant a league-wide warning that year. All of these players are now 100% liable for the welfare of these children and their former partners by default because there are no laws protecting men from fraudulent pregnancies.
To what degree is protection implicitly implied? If a man does everything in his power to avoid a pregnancy (barring abstinence or a vasectomy) and can prove his intent and the woman still becomes pregnant, even by fraud, the man is still liable for that pregnancy. Women are 100% protected and men are 0% protected. I can even go so far as to quote you cases where a man marrying a single mother later divorces her and is still expected to pay future child support for a child he did not father – even without official adoption of the child by the man.
A lot of guys would like to make a moral issue of this but it’s not a question of right or wrong, it’s dealing with the facts of what IS in the environment we find ourselves in today. The fact of the matter is that unless men use prior discretion and take responsibility for the birth ‘control’, not allowing a woman to be solely responsible for it, he is 100% powerless. This means bring your own condoms and flush them yourself, and yes even (especially) in an LTR or marriage. That means standing firm even when she says “take that thing off I’m on the pill and I want to ‘feeeeel’ you.” Mothers want to be Mothers, otherwise they’d decide not to be. Single Mommies are far too common an occurrence to bet the odds with the rest of your life.
The sexual revolution had far more to do with the development of hormonal means of birth control than the legalization of abortion. Condoms have been around since before WWII, but even in the Baby Boom there were far less unwanted pregnancies or single motherhood than after the advent of the pill. The pill put the control of birth into the hands of women where before it was a man’s responsibility to put the rubber on and do so correctly if both wanted to avoid smaller versions of themselves running around the house.
The Choice of Professionals
Abortion rates skyrocketed in the decades after estrogen based birth control was developed, thus prompting a need for legal and clinical regulations of abortions as well as reforming paternity laws in the 70s. There had certainly been abortions (both the medical and back-alley variety) prior to this, but if you look at the increase in abortion statistics both before and after the advent of a convenient form of birth control moderated by the women taking it, it’ll blow your mind.
And now even with the vast variety of birth control methods available to women today and 30+ years of safe medical abortions, we still see an increase in single mother families and abortion rates. One would think that these statistics would be lower in light of all this modernization and the ‘leaps’ women have made culturally since the sexual revolution, but sadly no. In fact the single mother birth rate has climbed (adjusted for population) since a leveling off in the late 80s and abortion is just as popular as ever even when new methods such as the ‘morning after pill’ and RU286 are readily available. And conveniently, the social ills as a result are placed squarely on ‘dead-beat Dads’ rather than the women choosing to have the children.
This isn’t a scientific problem, it’s a cultural one. Mothers want to be Mothers. Men are only Fathers when a woman decides this for him even in the happiest of marriages. I think (hope) we’ll see second sexual revolution once a male form of hormonal contraception is tested and available, but you can bet dicks to donuts that every interested party from the religious to the feminist will fight this method’s release to the public at large and come up with every sort of veiled explanation for it’s demonization in order to put the agency of birth control exclusively into men’s control. I sincerely doubt men will “forget to take it” or have their ‘accidents’ in the numbers women do.
Controlling the Birth
It’s a much different task to put on a condom in the heat of the moment (reactive) than to simply swallow a pill in the morning (proactive). It’s arguable what the more difficult task is, to remember to take a pill in the morning or to apply a condom at the appropriate time. In the latter situation there are at least 2 people aware that a condom should be on prior to intercourse; is a woman equally an accomplice in her own pregnancy if she consensually has sex with a guy without a condom? They both know the assumed risks, however a woman forgetting to take her pill isn’t reviled as an ‘idiot’ or negligent as a man not putting on a condom.
Taking her birth control is up to her and rarely would a guy be certain on a daily basis that his partner was faithfully taking her pill. In fact to even ask about it would be presumptuous and bordering on rude if it’s a casual encounter. When a man and a woman fail to take the precaution of putting on a condom they’re both aware of it. When she fails to take her pill either accidentally or intentionally, she is the sole party responsible for that pregnancy, but in either case she decides the course of the man’s life should this occur.
The obvious answer is to put men in control of the birth – wear a condom. However the nature of mens birth control is reactive and even in the case where a man has the condom in his pocket, he can still be thwarted by her only saying, “don’t worry about it, I’m on the pill”; the control shifts the accountability never does.
Forgive me for belaboring the point, but there are no accidental mothers. Consider fertility statistics and that it takes a considerable amount of negligence for a woman to miss several pills on a regular basis to ‘accidentally’ become pregnant. One could also argue that even a couple engaging in condom-less sex could still be relatively confident that a woman wont get pregnant even if she’s missed several pills regularly. Again my point being that it takes effort to become pregnant. Even without any birth control at all and timing my wife’s ovulation cycles for our sex it took us 4 months to conceive our daughter. This is why I laugh at the accidental pregnancy excuse so common these days. If a woman wants to become pregnant she can do so with impunity and contrive any excuse she’d like about accidents, but the guy is an ‘idiot’ for not wearing a condom and taking responsibility for his actions, even if he’s led to believe she’s taking control of her contraception. Yet he is the one penalized both financially and socially because of her choice.