Why Don’t Men Get More Credit for Abortion?

If men are responsible for every unwanted pregnancy, shouldn’t they get some recognition?

I spent last weekend at the Super Bowl, not because I have particularly strong opinions about football, but because if you want to understand America, sometimes you have to go where the men are. And if there’s one place that qualifies as the holiest pilgrimage site for the modern American man, it’s this. So there I was, in a sea of jerseys, face paint, and foam fingers, asking a question that, honestly, I wasn’t sure how people would react to.

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“What percentage of abortions are caused by men?”

It wasn’t a trick question. It wasn’t meant to embarrass anyone. I just wanted to see how guys thought about an issue that, in reality, they have everything to do with.

And yet, the responses were eerily consistent: “Zero percent” said one guy.
“I’ve never caused an abortion,” said another. Many told me they didn’t even know a guy who had.

Which raises an interesting mystery: If no men are causing abortions, where are they all coming from?

Are they appearing out of thin air, like crop circles? Have women unlocked some new evolutionary feature that allows them to self-impregnate through sheer determination? Because if men aren’t causing pregnancies, someone needs to alert the Vatican because this might be the biggest thing since the Virgin Mary. You’d think a reproductive breakthrough of this scale would be making headlines, maybe even prompting a congressional hearing or two. But no, instead of investigating this medical marvel, all the attention is on women, wagging fingers at them for making decisions about pregnancies they apparently willed into existence all by themselves.

And that just seems… unfair. To men! When something happens, we usually acknowledge who’s behind it. Yet here, in one of the most fiercely debated moral issues of our time, the people who set the whole thing in motion (men!) are nowhere to be found. If men are the ones responsible for every unwanted pregnancy, shouldn’t they at least be acknowledged for their contributions to abortion? Women know all too well what it’s like to do the work and have someone else get all the credit, so why, for once, is it the other way around?

The entire debate around abortion is built on the assumption that pregnancy just happens to women, like a parking ticket. But it doesn’t. It happens because of men. Every single time.

At its core, the question of who causes abortion is really about how we assign responsibility in a way that reflects our biases rather than reality. We treat abortion as if it’s an isolated event—something women just do, disconnected from what led to it. But if an abortion happens because a pregnancy happened, and a pregnancy happened because a man initiated it, then isn’t the abortion, in some fundamental way, a result of that original action?

And yet, the conversation around reproductive health never seems to acknowledge that. Instead, we ask why women don’t just “close their legs,” why they don’t go on birth control, why they don’t carry pregnancies they didn’t want or plan for. We legislate their bodies, criminalize their choices, force them into impossible situations, all while the other half of the equation walks away, unscathed and unmentioned.

Maybe men don’t see themselves as part of the conversation because no one has ever asked them to. Or maybe it’s because the conversation has always been framed around women’s responsibility: women’s choices, women’s mistakes, women’s consequences. But if we actually want a healthy, honest discussion about reproductive health, and policies that support it, we need to start talking about men’s choices too. Their role. Their responsibility. Their consequences.

Or at the very least, let’s give them some credit.