When Men Disappear from Fertility

Last week was “NFP Awareness Week,” and, as usual, I am showing up late to the party.  Although my party started actually before said week, when I read this response to a BuzzFeed on contraception.  The actual post is not my cup of tea (I am not so much about slogans and sound-bites), but the comments are, wonder of wonders, well-moderated!  After reading the NFP post, the contraceptives post, and the NFP comments, I found myself thinking, “There’s something missing here.”


Many of the women, on both sides of the debate, wrote at one point or another went from “It’s my body that is getting pregnant” to “It’s my fertility.”  They went so smoothly from one to the other that I don’t think there was conscious thought about that sequence.  Even when the discussion was explicitly in reference to a married woman, this slide took place.  Even when the discussion focused around a husband’s role, this premise was never challenged.

I desperately wanted someone to.  So here I go!

For a married person, there is no such thing as “my fertility.”  There is only such as thing as “our fertility.”  Sure, if a couple conceives a child, only the woman gets pregnant.  Only the woman’s body goes through irreversible changes, only the woman’s body shows signs of that growing child for months, only the woman must change her lifestyle to make her body hospitable to this new life.  Only the woman will birth that child into this world, only the woman will need time to recover physically from this experience, only the woman can nourish that child with her body.

But it took two people to make that child and those two people will be working in tandem to raise that child.  Both parents’ lives will be irrevocably changed by the existence of that child.  The decision to bring a new life into this world does not belong solely to the wife.  The decision to make a child, the act whereby that decision becomes real, and the rearing of that child all belong to a couple.

For a married woman, no matter what her “family planning” choices, her fertility is not her own.  “Her” fertility, like “her” marriage, is only half of a whole, which is not complete without “his.”