THE OTHER PLAN B

On the need to shift the abortion rights debate from "My body, my choice!" to one that recognizes men as equal beneficiaries

- SHIRA TARRANT

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 onenight 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.