Here is the new bogeyman of the 2010s:  coerced reproduction.  It will be what “date rape” was to the 1990s, and what “global warming” was to the 2000s. 

Teenage pregnancies are on the rise because girls’ boyfriends sabotage their contraception, poke holes in their own condoms, and favor the raw-dog.  That’s the story.  Memorize it.  But to hear some feminists tell it, teenage pregnancy is on the rise because abstinence awareness pogroms have undermined efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancy – like condom and Pill use.  Now we’re hit with the argument that those condoms – if they’re used at all – may have been sabotaged in order for young men to keep their women chained to their side via unwanted pregnancy.  Two strikes against the patriarchy. 

Before I start – a slight digression.  It’s convenient that feminists try to shift the problem of increased teen pregnancy from irresponsible behavior on the part of young men and women to bad behavior on the part of young men.  They correlate higher unplanned pregnancy rates as stemming from male reproductive coercion while, if it exists, it probably didn’t start yesterday.  Feminists don’t consider the possibility that their relaxed attitudes towards sex are part of the cause in the increase in unwanted pregnancies; they are effectively putting the onus on us.     

The headlines come from a recent cross-sectional study of five Northern California family planning clinics.  In a sample of 1,278 women, 53% said they were the victim of physical or sexual violence at the hands of their partners while 20% say they were pressured into having a child.  One-third of women who were party to domestic abuse felt coerced into pregnancy while 15% of unabused women felt the same way.

I really shouldn’t have to discredit the selection bias of this study.  But I’m bored, so I will – succinctly.  Poor women more often go to family planning clinics.  Unwanted pregnancies are more highly correlated with lower socioeconomic status.  Poor women get beaten by their men at higher rates.  Poor men, when not beating their women, are more likely to engage in other forms of emotional abuse similar to reproductive coercion.  For what it’s worth, far fewer than 15% or 33% of women are coerced into pregnancy in manners that the research suggests.  But to put the actual cases of coerced reproduction into perspective, men take shits, and although we don’t like to hear it, so do women. 

This just-so report has several nifty features that fit perfectly into feminist arsenals.  If we believe the overarching picture painted in this report, young men trap their female partners into staying with them by poking holes in condoms and flushing Pills down the toilet.  These incidents are reported in family health clinics to social workers whose job is to tease this type of information out of women like a barber teases ratted hair.  Women have venues to report their stories of “reproductive coercion”.

But what about the men who undergo similar trauma?  There isn’t a nearby reproductive rights facility for them to expel their crocodile tears and horror stories.  Unfortunately, drinking buddies don’t carry the same academic weight as sociologists or even feminists.  There no measurement devices by which to gauge the amount of coerced reproduction men face on a constant basis.  What about online message boards?  How about articles from a real live woman at a reputable site like Salon.com? Females’ reproductive coercion of males flies under the radar as it is more passive-aggressive.  Understand:  this fact doesn’t make it any better.

So since we don’t have any corroborating studies with evidence to support mens’ horror stories of reproductive coercion at the hands of women with baby rabies, we’ll have to develop a priori arguments and anecdotal evidence to support the argument that women employ reproductive coercion much more than men.  If these arguments appear to be true, we might as well burn every rag on which every forth-coming male-bashing story is printed (in fact, let’s burn them anyway). 

  • Who exclaims their desire to have children more often?  Men or women?
  • Who gets baby rabies more often?  Men or women?
  • Who is more likely give their partner an ultimatum to force them to have children?
  • Who has the pesky biological clock that won’t stop ticking?
  • Who gains more, overall and on average, by having children?
  • Which gender benefits most from social welfare after having a child?
  • Who are the gatekeepers?

If the answer to these questions, by and large, is men, my argument is null and void.   

Then there are the tactical arguments.  Women have the most power over their own birth control; if anyone were going to sabotage the Pill cycle, women would be the most likely suspects.  Pill skipping or misuse of the Pill is a much more passive-aggressive means to getting pregnant.  It isn’t as aggressive as choking a woman and telling her to have your child, but it has the same outcome.  The fact that Pill skipping is perfectly legal while choking a girlfriend will get a man tossed into jail implies that the former is a much more plausible strategy if someone were going to force another person into conception.  What’s worse is that the man really has no say in the matter; if a man flushes a woman’s Pill down the toilet, she knows that she missed her Pill.  It’s her choice to have sex amid such risk.  If the man rapes her to coerce pregnancy; that’s a whole new issue. 

We also don’t hear of the women who practice the Timing Method but don’t keep good time – on purpose.  We don’t hear of the emotionally dependent women whose main goal in life is to have a child so they can trap their man.  We don’t hear of the relationships in which the man is given an ultimatum to either make with the sperm or pack up and leave.  Again, if anyone is going to be trapped by a pregnancy, the man is the one most likely to wear the collar.

Furthermore, as with all studies that seek to rip men to bits to provide kibble for man-haters, it is most convenient to look down towards the low end of society to provide the vivid brushstrokes that help the image of male treachery pop. 

If there were a dearth of men engaging in reproductive coercion at higher rates than women, it would most likely come among lower-status men.  They are the ones that have a harder time finding partners; they more likely engage in mate-guarding tactics, shaming behavior, and violence to keep their woman chained to them. 

But if there were a dearth of women engaging in reproductive coercion at higher rates than men, it would most likely happen to higher-status men.  Women come out of the woodwork to claim paternity against men who have lots of money and good jobs compared to men with no jobs and no prospects. 

So since women are painting this picture, and the picture sells better when the men look really bad, ugly, and scary (and their scariness comes from the fact that there are so many men out there like this), their Muses are men from the left tail of the spectrum. 

Chuck Ross lives in the Midwest and sneaks extra pellets of Orthotricycline into his girlfriend’s food – just for safe measure.  He blogs daily at Gucci Little Piggy.