I’ve been following the Lindsay Clancy trial, and it keeps bringing me back to something that comes up constantly in discussions here: “paper abortion” or legal parental surrender for men.

Yesterday, I challenged someone arguing for it to explain what actually happens medically during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum recovery. Not “your organs move around” or “pregnancy causes stretch marks.” I mean actually explain the medical risks and consequences.

Because if you're going to argue that men deserve an equivalent reproductive exit, you should probably understand what you're claiming equivalence to.

This reminded me of a conversation I had years ago, when I was still presenting as a man. Some women I worked with told me that, of the men they knew, I was basically the only one they would trust with the right to legally surrender parental responsibility.

They gave me two reasons.

First, I actually knew what pregnancy and childbirth could do to a woman.

Second, they believed I would be a really, really good father. I was emotionally available enough and took parental responsibility seriously enough that they trusted I wouldn't walk away from a child unless I had an extremely legitimate reason.

And that conversation changed my position substantially.

Because no, men and women do not occupy equivalent positions here.

A woman doesn't need to produce some sufficiently compelling justification for ending a pregnancy because it's happening to her body. Pregnancy itself is the justification for having authority over whether she remains pregnant.

The man is not pregnant.

He isn't risking hemorrhage, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, pelvic-floor injury, emergency surgery, cardiovascular complications, permanent bodily changes, infertility, severe postpartum psychiatric illness, or death. He doesn't undergo childbirth and then spend weeks or months physically recovering from it.

And pregnancy doesn't magically stop affecting someone when the baby comes out.

Which brings me back to Lindsay Clancy.

Whatever the jury ultimately decides about her criminal responsibility, the case is an absolutely horrifying illustration of something that gets almost completely erased when men discuss reproductive “equality”: postpartum psychiatric illness can be catastrophic.

Clancy sought psychiatric treatment. Her condition deteriorated. She was prescribed numerous psychiatric medications and treated by multiple providers. She experienced suicidal thoughts, was hospitalized, and her defense argues that she was suffering from severe postpartum mental illness, including psychosis, when she killed her three children and attempted to kill herself, leaving herself paralyzed.

Three children are dead. Their mother nearly died and will live with catastrophic injuries. And a jury is now determining her criminal responsibility while the medical treatment she received before the killings is being picked apart in court.

That is reproductive risk too.

Pregnancy isn't nine months of being uncomfortable followed by a baby.

And this is where it becomes relevant to dating.

People here endlessly ask why women are increasingly reluctant to date men, sleep with men, marry men, or otherwise structure their lives around men.

Look at the fucking risk calculation.

Sex with a fertile man can result in pregnancy. Pregnancy can impose enormous physical and psychiatric consequences on the woman while imposing none of those biological consequences on the man.

And we're having this conversation in post-Dobbs America, where women can no longer simply assume that if they become pregnant, they'll have the legal ability to decide whether they remain pregnant.

So imagine being a woman looking at that risk calculation.

Pregnancy can permanently alter your body. It can disable you. It can kill you. Childbirth can injure you. The postpartum period can produce serious medical and psychiatric complications. You may encounter a medical system that minimizes your symptoms or fails you entirely. Depending on where you live and what happens politically, you may not even have meaningful control over whether you continue the pregnancy in the first place.

And the man you're sleeping with?

He's arguing that he needs another escape hatch.

Then men wonder why women are becoming more selective about having sex with them.

This isn't because pregnancy suddenly became dangerous. Pregnancy has always been dangerous.

What changed is women's ability to say no.

For most of history, women had dramatically less economic, social, legal, and sexual agency to decide that having sex with, marrying, or reproducing with a particular man simply wasn't worth the risk.

Increasingly, they do.

So yes, the math changes.

If having sex with a man carries a small possibility of an enormous physical, psychiatric, economic, and legal consequence, while that man doesn't even understand those consequences and simultaneously believes he deserves an easier mechanism for abandoning responsibility for the result, why exactly should a woman consider that a good deal?

Women aren't broodmares.

They can look at the risks. They can look at what a particular man is offering in return. They can do the math.

And increasingly, they can simply say:

No. You're not worth the risk.