YORK COUNTY, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — A New York Times best-seller is making its way across the nation with a significant message: “Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think about Abortion.”
“I love that with the title you don’t actually have to read the book to know what it’s about,” said women’s rights activist Mallory Dittmer.
With South Carolina holding its breath for a possible six-week abortion ban, Dittmer says she and hundreds of other women still plan to fight the legislation.
“I just felt called to do something watching the debate happen yesterday and I posted it on my Instagram and just asked, ‘Who else thinks that we should get some of these books in the hands of our legislators?’,” Dittmer said.
She says the response was incredible. She took in over $1,200 in donations within a day to purchase the book from Amazon.
“And really we’re going to very thoughtfully and sincerely give them to our legislators to help them maybe have one of those aha moments,” Dittmer said.
Author Gabrielle Blair says the title of the book was meant just for that.
“Ultimately, it’s also like a declaration — like it sums up everything I’m asking men to do: ‘Ejaculate Responsibly,’” Blair said. “And if they do, it solves a whole host of problems.”
She says the book came as a result of a 2018 Twitter thread where she shared her thoughts during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
One tweet says “I’m a mother of six and a Mormon, I have a good understanding of arguments surrounding abortion, religious and otherwise… If you want to stop abortion, you need to prevent unwanted pregnancies. And men are 100% responsible for unwanted pregnancies.”
A few years later, Blair published the book hoping to shift the conversation.
“Shifting the conversation to prevention, to preventing unwanted pregnancies, it just takes all the emotion out of it,” Blair said. “Suddenly, we don’t have to like debate when life begins. Is it a baby? Is it a fetus? Like, we don’t have to discuss any of that because we didn’t cause a pregnancy because the man chose to ejaculate responsibly.”
But she makes it clear that she isn’t placing the burden solely on men.
“My book does not absolve women of their responsibility, it just reminds men of theirs,” Blair said.
In the book, she discusses men’s fertility, condoms being the cheapest and easiest way to prevent pregnancy, and most sexually transmitted diseases.
“Men are always fertile,” the author said. “They never have to guess if it’s a fertile day; they know that it is. Women, we never know when we’re fertile. In fact, even if you have a very regular cycle, like every four weeks, every 28 days, you could still ovulate. Anytime in a 10-day window, it could be different one month and the next. So for women, it’s really hard to know when we’re fertile.”
Dittmer says the group of women is planning a day to distribute the books, but she’s still holding out hope that the bill doesn’t pass through the Senate.
“This ban that they’re going to pass is very, very similar to a ban that the Supreme Court of South Carolina already ruled as unconstitutional earlier this year,” Dittmer said. “And so the fact that we’re even back here again, that taxpayer money is being used to argue these bans again when our own Supreme Court said that this infringes on the privacy of women way too much to be constituted now is just ridiculous.”
