If progressives aren’t careful, their response to pro-life laws may become so radical that they may horseshoe neatly back to reverse-engineering the sexual revolution.
There have been a few humorous examples of this recently. In 2019, Alyssa Milano called for a “sex strike” in response to abortion laws. If we can’t have abortions, she said, we won’t have any more sex with men we don’t want to have babies with. Pro-lifers accepted her terms with great enthusiasm, and the idea fizzled.
It happened again after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Women announced that a “sex strike” would be collective cultural punishment for eliminating abortion as a “constitutional right.” As one activist declared: “WOMEN HAVE THE POWER HERE. NO MORE SEX UNTIL ABORTION RIGHTS ARE FEDERAL LAW.” Monique Pressley even proposed – wait for it – “abstinence” as a response to the crisis of states passing protections for pre-born children.
Even the LGBT movement, perhaps exhausted with the sheer pace of multiplying orientations and genders, has come up with an orientation that sound suspiciously like a desire for monogamy: “Demisexuality,” which is defined as feeling “sexual attraction to someone after forming a strong emotional bond with them.” Well, how about that? Seems I’ve heard about something similar someplace.
Now, Democratic Mississippi state Senator Bradford Blackmon is in the game. Blackmon proposed a “satirical” bill last month titled “The Contraception Begins at Erection Act,” which he says is intended to fight back against pro-life laws. The law contains stiff fines for violations, including $1,000 for a first offense, $5,000 for a second offense, and $10,000 for three or more offenses.
“All across the country, especially here in Mississippi, the vast majority of bills relating to contraception and/or abortion focus on the woman’s role when men are 50 percent of the equation,” Blackmon stated. “This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation. People can get up in arms and call it absurd, but I can’t say that bothers me.”
Blackmon’s bill seeks to “provide that it shall be unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material (that is, sperm) without the intent to fertilize an embryo.” He certainly didn’t intend to say this, but his proposal roughly translates to: If women can’t have abortions, men are going to have to control their libidos, act responsibly, and only engage in sex if they are willing to take responsibility for a resulting child.
The bill is supposed to be making a rhetorical point, but I kind of … agree with the point.
The overturn of Roe has been an apocalypse – that is, revelation – in many ways. The abortion industry has always been a grotesque safety valve for the sexual revolution. If we are going to use our reproductive organs recreationally, we will need to find a way to eliminate the results – children – when sex works the way it is supposed to. “Choice” and “bodily autonomy” are nice buzzwords, but when you get right down to it, abortion is about the ability to kill children who are, for the most part, “unwanted” because we have decided to collectively pretend that sex and procreation can be separated.
But the responses to pro-life laws have exposed the truth. When women announce that promiscuity is off the table so long as abortion is unavailable, that is a frank admission about what abortion is primarily for. When Sen. Blackmon says that “contraception begins at erection,” he is admitting that it is the promiscuous and frequently predatory behavior of irresponsible men that drives much of the demand for abortion. His tongue-in-cheek solution, in other words, isn’t satirizing the people he thinks it is.
Of course, the GOP-led Mississippi legislature won’t pass Blackmon’s bill, and if they did, the governor of Mississippi wouldn’t sign it. But Blackmon has, I think, provided a very good opportunity for pro-lifers to point out that he isn’t all wrong; his solution does, in fact, highlight a real problem.
Ironically, perhaps Blackmon’s worst nightmare would be his bill passing and being signed into law. Be careful what you wish for.
