I was reading an article on postpartum depression the other day and then I came across the news story from last year about a guy eating pizza while his wife was giving birth. This sub is filled with posts listing the consequences of having children with LVM and spotting the signs to prevent such scenarios, but I also think that many men just don’t drop the mask until pregnancy, when women are at our most vulnerable.

Baby-trapped women are a thing, especially now with abortion laws becoming more restrictive in the US. Once a woman gets pregnant, her body starts changing. Even if she gets an abortion, she was still pregnant with a child and her body won’t be the same. Even if she gives up the baby for adoption, lots of people would know about it and she’d be stigmatized. And of course, she would still be recovering from childbirth.

Every time I try to look up something in relation to childbirth, I get two very different messages. Either childbirth will be a magical experience or it will ruin a woman’s life. That’s not only terrifying, but provides no way for someone to actually make an informed decision about childbirth. Well, I think the point is for women to not have the information to make an informed decision on wether they want to be pregnant or not.

Sure, there’s women who know they want to be childfree and women who know their right now isn’t the time for a baby. But there are plenty of women who are unsure, and this lack of information on the dangers of pregnancy is critical to women being unable to make a decision. A poorly-informed decision isn’t a decision at all. While women try to scrounge up information, viability kicks in and, suddenly, painfully, tragically, an abortion is now out of bounds.

It’s the first roadblock to abortions, if you will. If they don’t know they want one, how can they get them performed? Why do you have to wait three days or get an ultrasound or talk to a therapist before you get an abortion performed? To make you doubt. To make you hesitate. It’s hateful. It encourages trauma. It ruins women’s mental and physical health. It’s awful.

Society needs children and a big percentage of women must give birth to get those children. This is why the moment women get pregnant, it’s all about the baby. And am I surprised that’s the case? No. Every time I go on twitter, I see a thread about a woman going to her gynecologist for random cases of extreme pain and bleeding only to have their doctor dismiss them with, “I don’t know what’s happening but it should be all good, I hope!” If that’s the care and value women receive during their everyday lives, how do we expect that care to be better when a baby is involved and the woman becomes a secondary concern?

So with society being so encouraging of trapping women with children they might or might not want, I’m not surprised that men do it as often as they do. Pregnant women doing all the housework, women who just gave birth waking up to take care of infants while their husbands or boyfriends go out with friends. Women who see this and finally realize the baby was not a good idea, not with this man, and try to fix this, only to be given malicious compliance—she wants him to do laundry, he pretends he doesn’t know he’s not supposed to pour bleach on black clothes, and she never asks him to do it ever again. These women, with their doubled workload and newly-developed health issues, how are they supposed to get a divorce then?

And if they do, single motherhood is thankless. It’s the bleach on black clothes fake compliance test up to eleven. It’s men not paying child support or as little as they can. It’s women trying to shape children into good people while her ex does her best to undermine her. It’s her being the strict, boring parent while he gets to be the cool one even though he might not even keep a spare bed for the child. It’s not being able to block and delete, and weathering abuse for years for a mistake that’s years old.

It’s a scam, and many women just realize it too late. I don’t know how I’ll ever go back to dating. It terrifies me because vetting is all well and good, but what if he’s just too slick? What if.