“Reimagining Reproduction: What Would Happen If Women Controlled the Future of Abortion?”
Instead, they would be free to terminate the pregnancy without a 24-second waiting period or a water burial for the microscopic detritus. Safe and effective abortion would be available in every mangrove and estuary on earth to any female who swam on by. Why are we males not afforded the same agency over our reproductive organs?
Females, until you can become pregnant yourselves, kindly keep your opinions out of my brood pouch.
Abortion was made legal underwater nearly 50 years ago in Salmon Roe v. Wave, yet there is still a stigma attached to what is no more serious a procedure than allowing a goby fish to clean the parasites from my gills. Because of some arcane, pelagic social norms, I am supposed to feel shame for not simply lying back on my dorsal fin and accepting my role as an empty vessel for female seahorse ova.
Hello—it’s the 21st century. Not every male seahorse needs to become a parent to 1,500 babies in order to feel fulfilled.
These days, the thalassic powers seem to find a perverse joy in making it as difficult as possible for male seahorses to find obstetric andrological care. Males are forced to travel across the entire ecosystem to locate a Planned Spawning clinic, as bioerosion and lack of funding have rendered the calcium carbonate structures few and far between.
Too often, female seahorses dismiss pregnancy as if it were merely a 45-day inconvenience, when in actuality we are solely responsible for the nutrition, gas exchange, and osmoregulation for thousands of helpless fry at once. It can be quite draining, to say the least. Not to mention how drastically it changes the shape of the ventral midline of our tails, to the point that we can barely anchor ourselves to the reeds comfortably. Then we’re expected to lose the ounce that we gained in our bellies and return to prime breeding form again within hours or incur the blame for our female mates no longer being attracted to us.
