This is a message you don’t hear very much anymore: men and women need to take equal responsibility for their actions.

From Rosemary Bottcher, in her essay, Feminism: Bewitched by Abortion, which was published in 1987:

Women who think they can’t be equal without their abortions forget that the law expects and requires that a man provide for his children, even though doing so may cause him much inconvenience. A man cannot demand that he be excused from his duty because his career might suffer. He can’t say, “I’m not ready for children,” or “I have enough already,” or “I don’t want that child.” He knew what he was doing when he did it and he should expect to be held accountable. Men are expected to be mature, and the mark of maturity is the willingness to accept the consequences of one’s actions, even though doing so may cause sacrifice and even hardships. Women who want equality can demand no less of themselves.

Rather, we now hear that men and women should be equally irresponsible for their actions.

From Elizabeth Brake, in her essay, Fatherhood and Child Support: Do Men Have a Right to Choose?, published in 2005:

The main point will be that if women’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a fetus, then men’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a resulting child.

It seems that we’re willing to sacrifice ourselves and our children in the name of sexual autonomy. We’re killing our children through abortions, shirking our responsibilities as adults and parents, and forfeiting our character, just to ensure that we can have sex any time with anyone. We do this in order to pretend that there are no life-changing consequences that can result from each sexual encounter, such as pregnancy and STDs.

Crazy charting of a natural family planning method, see photo. It’s not always easy, but it’s better than the alternatives. And what it does is make a couple aware of their fertility, which is dictated by the woman’s fertility, because of the way biology works. In this article, a man testifies to the benefits. Imagine that. One of them being that you could actually get to know your wife:

Hormonal contraceptives have this weird effect of putting women in an artificial state, as if they were pregnant all the time. It flattens the normal ebb and flow of hormones and thus of their energies and moods. They’re not themselves. Imagine yourself on steroids all the time. If she’s been on the pill ever since you’ve known her, you may have yet to meet your spouse.

He then goes on to itemize other benefits of natural family planning for men. I like the way he ends:

I’m not in your shoes, and the information I presented above can easily be picked apart. I realize it’s a quick overview of a complex topic. All I am suggesting is for you men to consider this option very seriously and don’t be absentminded or passive about the topic. There is a better world out there, and it’s worth checking out.

The bold struck me as critical. Getting pregnant or pregnancy prevention is not, should not be, the sole purview of the woman. The Pill and “my body, my choice” has made it so for the current era. It’s a burden for many women, and that burden ought to be shared. I’ve often wondered about men who are so adamant they don’t want children… are they equally adamant about remaining chaste? Because guess what? One thing (sex) leads to another (children), often enough.

Let’s start the morning off with some controversial and depressing news:

Unfortunately for the more than 10 million American women who take oral contraceptives, hardly anyone reported that the World Health Organization also classified the combination Pill as a carcinogen. In fact, the Pill continues to be the most popular method of contraception in this country, particularly for women under the age of 30.  A little over a year after the World Health Organization announced its findings, the prestigious medical journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings published an article called “Oral Contraceptive Use as a Risk Factor for Premenopausal Breast Cancer: A Meta-analysis.” This analysis assessed the results of 34 studies conducted since 1980 to examine the possible association between oral contraceptive use and breast cancer risk in women younger than 50, and came to following conclusion: “Consistent with the recent International Agency for Research on Cancer classification of OCs as group 1 carcinogens, this meta-analysis suggests that OCs are associated with an increase in premenopausal breast cancer risk, especially among women who use OCs before FFTP [first full-term pregnancy].”

Even more recently, a 2009 study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that “a year or more of oral contraceptive use was associated with a 4.2-fold increased risk of triple-negative breast cancer for women 40 and under.

This spring marks the 55th anniversary of the birth control pill. I think it’s a good opportunity to talk about the link between the pill and breast cancer. If we’re truly pro-woman, we need to be pro-informed consent. Being left in the dark about the pill’s very real side effects isn’t empowering or liberating.