Pro-abortion activists are now urgining men to take a stand in support of abortion rights, the Associated Press reported Sunday.
The AP highlighted a man named Donovan Atterberry who became a pro-abortion voting engagament organizer for New Voices for Reproductive Justice, which focuses on abortion access for black women and girls. He joined the organization after his then-girlfriend (now his wife) became pregnant and had an abortion after genetic testing found a lethal chromosomal disorder in the baby.
“As a man, I didn’t know how to console her, how to advise her,” Atterberry told AP. “I said, ‘If I had to choose, I would choose you.’ ... It wasn’t a matter of do I believe in abortion or I don’t believe in abortion. At that point, I was thinking about her life.”
He added “it [the abortion] changed my whole perspective ... on bodily autonomy and things of that nature.”
“What I’m trying to convey is that it’s a human right for someone to have a choice,” he said.
Early last month, an unprecedented leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization showed the Justices poised to overturn the landmark case Roe v. Wade. The news sent abortion advocates into a frenzy.
The AP added that women have always spearheaded the pro-abortion movement.
Women have always taken the lead in the fight to preserve abortion rights, for obvious reasons: They are the ones who give birth and who, in so many instances, are tasked with caring for children once they are brought into the world.
No one is calling for that leadership to change, said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University who specializes in law and gender.
“Men should not be out there trying to run the movement or take away leadership positions,” he said. “But being a part of it, supporting, listening and being active are all things that men can and should be doing.”
That’s what Oren Jacobson is trying to do at Men4Choice, the organization he co-founded in 2015, where the goal is to get men who say they support abortion rights to speak out and do more, such as protesting, making it a voting priority, and especially talking to other men.
“Everything we’re doing is focused on getting what are really millions of men — who in theory are pro-choice but are completely passive when it comes to their voice and their energy and their time in the fight for abortion rights and abortion access — to get off the sidelines and step in the fight as allies,” he said.
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Last month, Glamour published an op-ed by staff writer Jenny Singer where she wrote that she “better see straight men at abortion rights rallies” following the Dobbs leak. She noted that men’s groups show up at the March for Life every year.
She added in the piece that “most” men can’t be pregnant.
“I don’t know how else to convey the obvious to men: You’re not an ally. You’re a part of this,” she wrote.
It appears that the days of “no uterus, no opinion" are over.
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