Welcome to the waves, Slate's Podcast about Gender, Feminism and Making Men responsible

for their sperm.

Every episode you get a new parap of feminists to talk about the thing

we can't get off our minds and today you've got me Shaina Roth senior producer

here at Slate. This week we're waiting into the abortion argument again, but looking at it in a very different way.

We're looking at it from a getting pregnant in the first place lens and how we shift the burden from women to men.

Recently I was thrilled to realize that my home state Michigan is not the red bastion

the yard signs in my neighborhood would have had me believe. We passed a ballot

measure that enshrines the right to an abortion in our state constitution.

Which is fantastic. Abortions should be legal.

It's a medical procedure that politics really needs to stay the hell out of.

But it also got me thinking,

no one really wants to have an abortion.

It's not a game that people are playing. No one has sex

hoping that the experience will culminate in an abortion. It's what happens when there is an

unwanted pregnancy. There's also medical reasons for abortions

where the fetus is wanted but can't be carried, but we are focusing this episode on unwanted

pregnancies. So if no one wants to have abortions to begin with, shouldn't we be doing more to prevent unwanted pregnancies?

But when you start to think about it, the options that we have are very archaic and overwhelmingly focused on

what women have to do to prevent pregnancies. Most birth control options are for women and can

cause an array of side effects that run the

gamut in severity from headaches to death. Enter Gabriel Blair, her new book, or maybe the better word for it is manifesto,

...