She did not Get Herself Pregnant

Rejecting the lie that infertility is normative

Hey, America, we need to talk. There is an idiom that needs to find its way out of our collective consciousness. In order to root this illogical, non-sensical, misogynistic phrase out of our vocabulary, we have to look at the diseased philosophy which produced this rotten fruit. 

My friends, she did NOT “get herself pregnant.”

The first time I heard this expression was in junior high. An eighth grade girl disappeared. Where did she go, we asked… Oh, she got herself pregnant. Hmm, I wondered. How did she do that? If she could do that, was I at risk too? How does one get herself pregnant, exactly?

As we all know, at least on some level, she did not “get herself pregnant.” Humans are not amoebas, and we reproduce sexually. Absent some type of lab experiment or theft of the male gametes, there is always male participation in every act of procreation. 

When hormonal birth control was introduced in the 60s, it was touted as a path to liberation. Women could now be free from unintended pregnancy. Fueled by the sexual revolution and decoupling of long held Judeo-Christian sexual ethics, women were now able to engage in recreational sex with less immediate consequence, or so we were told. People who spoke out against this were regarded as prudes or backwards. The encyclical Humanae Vitae, although very good, was largely ignored. In a wider context was difficult to clearly articulate the inseparability of sex and procreation and its devastating effects for a lay audience focused on immediate temporal pleasure, and the cultural argument was quickly lost. 

Chemical sterilization quickly became the norm. Women are prescribed birth control as a first line medication against almost all that ails them. Headache? Birth control. Acne? Birth Control. Menstrual cramps? Birth Control. Being a teenager? Birth Control. Immediately postpartum? Gotta get that Birth Control.

What was initially offered as a liberator has enslaved women for generations. Not only is birth control offered, there is a presumed obligation on the part of the woman to be responsible by controlling, not birth, because there is no birth, but the most primal aspect of the human condition - her own fertility. 

Female fertility is wild and unpredictable. Employers benefit when this unknown variable is controlled with chemical sterilization through birth control. Pregnancies are unpredictable and have the potential to change the priorities of even the most devoted wage slave. You see the fruit of this in laws requiring birth control coverage by health insurance plans, even though we have known for decades that hormonal birth control is directly linked to many health problems, including stroke, deep vein thrombosis, and breast cancer. 

The harsh reality is that the powers that be, including the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Medical Association, and the United States Government promote hormonal birth control despite the known physical and mental health risks because they see women’s procreative power as a bigger threat than the possibility of killing or injuring women. As seen in the links in the previous paragrah, risks are dismissed and “debunked.” Gotta get the ladies infertile. Their fertility is the most dangerous power on the planet. The ends, for these organizations, clearly justify the means. The WHO even attempted to sterilize Kenyan women without their knowledge or consent under guise of a tetanus vaccination campaign suspiciously targeted only at women of child bearing age.

What has happened is that what was once a choice to be made to provide “freedom” from fertility is now a positive obligation of a “responsible” citizen. Birth control is the tool of a person who is taking charge of the situation and refusing to let unplanned or, even worse, unwanted pregnancies mess up the capitalist, eco-friendly structure. The powers that be have told us that fewer of us is a good thing, and we in the west believed them.

In the context of this foundational reframing of fertility as a burden to be controlled by women, a young woman who becomes pregnant at an inopportune time is seen as the (ir)responsible party. If she would have only tended to her duty to render herself infertile, she would not be able to “get herself pregnant.” Again, what was once sold as an opportunity has now become an obligation. 

The birth control mindset is so ingrained in our culture that it is difficult to take a step back and see it clearly. The reality is, however, that women are just fine the way we were created and we do not need any pills, potions, or devices to “fix” the “problem” of our fertility. We have a long way to go to normalized relations between the sexes in our society, but a great first step would be to question and then discard the lazy “medicine” of birth control which places the responsibility for fertility solely on the woman, allowing us to even say something as nonsensical as “she got herself pregnant” without recoiling at the utter absurdity of the very idea. 

Birth control was never the path to freedom, and now it has enslaved so many. My contempt for birth control knows no bounds. As G.K. Chesterton says “ I despise Birth-Control because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly thing.” The way forward is to reject this cowardly abdication of the gift of fertility and embrace the wild adventure that comes with our powerful and uncontrolled feminine superpower. 

Photo by Sarah Kranz on Unsplash

Like Esau in the Bible, both women and men who have believed in the lie of birth control have traded their birthright for a bowl of porridge. We, as a society, must reclaim the power of feminine fertility and the correlated power of masculine chivalry or the decline will inevitably continue.  If we refuse to reclaim these God given powers, they will be embraced by the civilization that rebuilds in our ashes.