One Weird Side-Effect of Roe V Wade Going Down?
Men may finally be forced to be responsible for their own fertility
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Just this week news of a brand new birth control pill for men was released. In lab trials, the pill is 99% effective at preventing pregnancy in mice, and human trials are set to begin this year. You may recall a few years ago, when a hormone-based birth control pill for men was being tested, but because of the side effects, development for that pill was scrapped. This new pill, GPHR-529, isn’t hormonal — rather, it works by disrupting the way vitamin A interacts with the body, temporarily inducing sterility in males. In trials, male mice were fertile again a few weeks after stopping the drug.
The timing couldn’t be better.
Sometime this year, probably this summer, the Supreme Court will hear a case out of Mississippi challenging Roe V Wade, and most people expect the current court, which has been packed with six Catholics hostile to reproductive rights, will overturn Roe V Wade, leaving abortion rights entirely up to individual states. This means abortion will effectively become illegal in large swaths of the US, especially across the South and Midwest.
If that happens, and people are forced to birth babies they can’t afford, I predict we’ll see more and more states — and mothers— not only suing impregnators for child support, but for half of the costs of pregnancy (multiple doctor’s appointments, lost work, etc.) and childbirth. As it stands now, fathers of unintended children are mostly only required to pay child support after the child is born, but in recent years, the costs of pregnancy and childbirth have skyrocketed, with even uncomplicated births with insurance costing about $5,000. (That still doesn’t take into account the costs of the multiple doctors appointments before the birth, and lost wages for pregnant people who are forced to take time off work.)
The motherhood penalty is real, and it costs women $16,000 a year in lost wages
If easily accessible abortion care becomes difficult to obtain, taxpayers are going to be loath to pick up the costs of taking care of all those financially disadvantaged women and children, and states will have become more aggressive, and creative, about recovering…
