Matt Walsh White Knights on Birth Control

I recently came upon a Matt Walsh article titled Birth Control Pills: Men Get Free Sex, Women Get Cancer. Frankly, I don’t want to get into Walsh’s discussion of the health risks associated with the pill. Walsh isn’t calling for improving the pill or extending the range of available birth control options, and he misses that there is an entire history of feminist activism dedicated to improving women’s health care and grappling with both male doctors and the medical establishment. Has Walsh ever heard of Our Bodies, Ourselves? We’re big girls, we got this. We don’t need Walsh waltzing in, tooting his horn, and telling us what to do.

I want to touch on Walsh’s title. I am so not okay with this framing, this idea that birth control means men get “free sex.” Is Walsh unaware of why the feminist movement started? During the 1960s, many women participated in the civil rights movement and various New Left groups, but they were often relegated to secretarial work and—yes—expected to put out. And yes, increasing birth control options contributed to that expectation. Did women respond by rueing the day birth control was invented? Um, no. Instead they started a liberation movement.

Modern feminism has centered the idea of consent. As women, we can now control our fertility through birth control, but that does not mean we are at men’s sexual beck and call—and it shouldn’t.

This framing also removes women’s sexual agency. Believe it or not, women want sex too. In my own relationship, I initiate sex at least as often as my husband Sean does, if not more often. People like Walsh often write as though birth control serves to make women sexually available to women without acknowledging that it makes men sexually available to women in just the same way. That feels weird to read, doesn’t it? But it’s true—a woman who is using birth control is able to have sex without having to worry about otherwise inevitable pregnancies.

Which actually brings us to another point. Walsh says the following:

The birth control pill is a dramatic and potentially harmful “medication” designed to “cure” a natural function of a woman’s body. It seems that men who develop and push these pills are vaguely sexist and anti-woman (OK, not vaguely) because they have literally made a female’s reproductive system into a sickness.

But what he’s not thinking about is that my reproduction system is mine—mine—not his, and that if I were not making efforts to prevent fertility, I would currently be pregnant with my fifth child, with the prospect of ten or so more in my future. My mother began having children the same age I did, and ultimately had twelve children. She used non-hormonal birth control methods to space us out and ultimately had her tubes tied because my father told her that enough was enough. I conceived my own children on the very first try each time, so I would assume I have inherited my mother’s fertility.

But I would like to not spend twenty years of my life pregnant and birthing children, thank you very much. In many ways, birth control is more about women being able to plan when and if they have children than it is about women being able to have sex. Women had sex before birth control, and they would continue to have sex without it. Too often conservatives want to make birth control all about sex when it’s really about family planning. We need to stop thinking about the birth control pill as a “free sex” pill and instead understand it as a way to ensure that each child comes into this world to parents ready and able to nurture and care for them.

Am I trying to “cure” a natural function of my body? I object to that framing, but honestly, so what if I am? Being able to choose how many children I want, and to plan when to have them, is a good enough reason to subvert my natural bodily functions in my book!

At one point Walsh says this:

You should read some of the stories of women who’ve been harmed by the pill, and then consider that they suffered these side effects because they were told that the natural workings of the female body should be treated like an affliction.

Can you see the infantilizing going on there? Women are mindless sheep who take the pill because they’re told to! Except that we’re not. I wonder, has Walsh ever stopped to consider, actually consider, the reasons women use birth control?

When the “Father of the Birth Control Pill” (now there’s an ironic title) died last week, I read several articles eulogizing him as a “liberator” of women. He liberated females from themselves, we’re told, and this is supposed to be a pro-woman sentiment?

Walsh really doesn’t get it, does he? I am more than my fertility. My ability to have children is not all there is about me. I make informed choices about what birth control is best for me and my needs, because I don’t want to have fifteen children thank you very much, and this is me freeing myself from myself? Um, no! My ovaries are not me!

Proponents of the pill degrade women by tying their human worth to their economic worth. They say that women must sterilize themselves, whether permanently or temporarily, in order to “succeed” in the business world. Her value as a woman, as a human being, is placed below her value as an employee or a consumer. I am rarely one to play the “S” Card, but perhaps this is where we ought to be looking in search of workplace sexism. . . .

. . . And if I worked at a place where I thought my chemically imposed impotence was the only way to get ahead, I’d quit and find an employer who won’t expect me to sacrifice my manhood for his sake. But then, I guess it’s OK for me to feel that way because that’s how I feel about the female version of this.

Okay, now allow me to quote a blog post of Walsh’s from exactly two months ago:

Should employers be legally forced to ‘accommodate’ pregnant employees? No. I’m as pro-life and pro-pregnancy as they come, but these sorts of regulations and impositions on employers have gotten completely out of hand.

Yes, you read that right.

Feminists push for policies that allow women to continue working while pregnant, maternity leave that enables women to take time off from work after birth, and workplace policies that give women the flexibility they need to stay on the job as mothers. Walsh is against requiring employers to do any of this. I have no idea how he can’t see his hypocrisy here.

This was going to be a short post, but then it got long. I want to finish by simply reiterating that I am tired—so tired—of men like Walsh lecturing women on the dangers of birth control. We know. Does Walsh think I didn’t agonize over lists of side effects before deciding on a method? Does he think women everywhere don’t do that? If he’s actually worried about the side effects of existing methods of birth control, he should call for more investment in birth control research—but he’s not doing that, because actually he’s against birth control entirely, because fertility is natural and awesome and shouldn’t be subverted.

If you’re against birth control because you essentialize women down to their ovaries, drop all the talk about how you’re against birth control because of its dangerous side effects. You’re not. And definitely don’t talk about how terrible it is that women feel pressure at work to stay on the pill and not have children when you oppose policies to ensure that women can have children while working without, you know, getting fired. Especially not when you think stay at home moms are better than working moms and are eager to broadcast that view to everyone who reads your very public blog.

Walsh and others like him consider themselves the True Champions of women, but nothing could be farther from the truth.