The Ugly Truth About Why Some Red Pill Men Call Themselves “Pro-Choice”

He sighed, and said, “I only date women who are pro choice.” I was confused at first. This man didn't seem like he was a feminist—in fact he had gone on a myriad of tangents already about how women struggle to do the things a man can do, like in business or repairing a leak. 

“Why?” I asked. 

He replied, “Because if I accidentally get a girl pregnant, I need to know that she will get an abortion.” 

I bursted out laughing. “That’s not pro-choice. That’s pro-abortion!” He either didn’t comprehend the distinction, or didn’t care to. 

I speak to a lot of red-pilled men—the manospheric kind that think the Tate brothers are victims and that women are villains only interested in bagging men with sports cars, and that men must master the “game” in order to make out objects in a field of female smoke bombs. These men hold hot-blooded opinions on the sorts of sanctions men ought to implement on their girlfriend’s sexuality: no swimsuit photos, no clubbing, no low-cut tops or ass-fitting shorts in public (unless her master is around to keep her on leash), no male friends (they just want to try and bed her anyway), no public Instagram account and make her pony up her log-ins. But fascinatingly, a lot of these men tend to be pro-choice. From a group eager to take away not only her Instagram account but also her right to vote, we can rule out the possibility that these men are pro-choice because they subscribe to a feminist ‘her body, her choice' motto. 

Instead, these men tend to wield pro-choice sentiments as a veneer to treat women as inconsequential cum-rags. Per red pill, knocking up or marrying a woman is seen as a male mouse trap—a diversion from the pursuit of rebirthing as a ‘high value man.’ Grandfather of the red pill, Rollo Tomassi has said: “The quickest way to becoming a high-value man: Do not get married, avoid family creation, vasectomy in your 20s.” Unless you take up a Gengis Khan approach and knock up a series of women without committing, sanitized by the likes of the Tate brothers and Elon Musk, knocking up a woman is strictly forbidden by the red pill. 

But these sorts of anti-natalist pushes from men aren’t insulated in the overtly misogynistic manosphere—they happen on a daily basis. 70% of women who have had an abortion describe them as coerced, pressured, or inconsistent with their own values. They largely cite feeling pressure from a male partner to get the abortion. 

70% of women who have had an abortion describe them as coerced, pressured, or inconsistent with their own values.

When I lived in LA, I met a man who worked for a social media startup that was trying to dethrone OnlyFans and become the new hot softcore porn app. This man was in his late thirties and his job was to sign as many girls as possible up onto the app as creators and get them to upload sellable, sexy content—whether they’ve already been in sex work or not. We met at the content house for this app, which I briefly stayed at, and he once told me a story of how when he had gotten his ex-girlfriend pregnant, he made her get an abortion. “How did you make her?” I asked. He said, “I sat her down calmly and said, ‘Look. Let me describe to you exactly what’s going to happen. If you get the abortion, we will keep being together. If you keep the baby, you will not hear from me again. You will be all alone. And nobody will want to date a single mother. Your life will be over.” She got the abortion. A few weeks after he told me this story, he was kicked out of the content house for allegedly bringing a sixteen year-old girl into his bedroom. 

In 2023, a man in North Carolina was accused of brutally beating his newborn son to death, after his girlfriend refused to get an abortion, like he had previously demanded. The mother, Takaylia Young, told the court that when she first got pregnant a year into the couple moving in together, “he wasn’t too happy about it…he said we’ll have to get an abortion.” She gave in, and got the abortion. When she became pregnant a second time, the couple argued, but she decided to keep the twin babies. Then one weekend, the babies stayed alone with the father, and both were beaten, one to death. 

Studies have shown that there is a link between intimate partner violence and termination of pregnancy. Abusive and controlling situations have always tended to dictate a woman’s reproductive situations, whether it be through forced sterilization and abortions in prison camps, forced abortions on sex workers by human traffickers, or China’s one child policy leading to forced abortions. 

38% of sex workers have had an abortion, though the number is probably much, much higher considering how many sex workers are unable to respond to surveys on this, due to being sex trafficked. Considering 90% of prostitutes would leave the industry if they could, it’s fair to claim that these women aren’t making a liberated choice about their reproductive health, and are instead being subject to maintaining themselves a proper and reusable sexual product for male customers. 

Per red pill, knocking up or marrying a woman is seen as a male mouse trap.

I’d argue that in a hookup culture world, where a significant portion of women go along with the sexual behaviors prescribed to them by an androcentric society which softly mirror that of sex workers—pressured into extreme, painful acts from men who don’t like you, expected to wax your body raw, and undergo cosmetic surgery such as breast implants, BBLs and labiaplasty to enhance your fuckability—it’s reasonable to assume a lot of women outside the professional sex trade who undergo abortions are doing so for a similar reason as the prostitute: to appease her male consumer. 

Women are significantly more agreeable than men, leading often to accepting lower salaries and avoiding negotiations, prioritizing harmony over conflict, and are less likely to leave an abusive situation than a man is. All in all, women are significantly more likely to follow a man’s lead, whether through force, coercion, or simply not wanting to stir up problems, and yet women have singularly been the face of the abortion movement and all the criticism it prompts. Pro-lifers often skewer women as being callous, selfish murderers for terminating a pregnancy for mere convenience. This harsh portrayal of women always leaves out criticisms of their male partners, who frequently coerce women into abortions. 

It’s curious that women are considered the face of the anti-natalism movement, when it’s actually men who more often promote racking up your body count, compare knocking up a woman to getting “baby trapped,” extol the pull-out method as their preferred method of birth control to pad their pleasure, and then have the gall to don the pro-choice label oftentimes to moralize their desire to opt out of fatherhood after this method fails (19% of men use the pull-out method; this number has doubled since 2002). He gets to have his cake and eat it, too. 

It’s unfortunate that women are skewered as callous for undergoing abortions, considering the callous ways in which pregnant women are often treated by the person who is supposed to be their partner in this. A woman is most likely to be cheated on when she is pregnant, and tragically, she is most likely to be physically abused while pregnant. 

No matter where you fall on the abortion debate—whether you believe a fetus deserves human rights or not, I think we can all agree it’s unconscionable to pressure a woman into an abortion, or leave her feeling like an abortion is her only choice—whether it be for financial reasons or because her partner is threatening her or harming her. 

Studies have shown that there is a link between intimate partner violence and termination of pregnancy.

Another date I recently went on was while I was on vacation in the Keys. He was young, 21, and I asked him if he was in college. He confessed that he dropped out of college because his high school girlfriend got pregnant. I thought he was about to tell me he was a father. Instead he said, “She told me that if I went off to college, she’d have the baby. But if I stayed in town, she would get an abortion.” He forfeited his swimming scholarship, stayed in town, and she got the abortion. He ended up breaking up with her. “She was crazy. She freaked out on me once because she found porn in my internet history, and woke me up to yell at me,” he told me. Since dropping out of college, he’s been working a string of non-degree requiring jobs, not that high-paying, and told me he hates his life. I was surprised by the sort of bleakness this sort of 21 year old spoke with—as if he was some 60 year-old divorcee. I thought, if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, he’d be in college right now, pursuing his dreams of going to the Olympics. “You’re young. You can still go to college,” I told him. “You’d be my age by the time you graduate, and I’m not that old I think.” But he just isn’t motivated to do it anymore.

I didn’t consider this boy an awful person for wanting his girlfriend to get an abortion and doing whatever it took to convince her to do it, including staying in town. He was barely eighteen. He just did what most guys his age do—have sex with girls they aren’t ready to marry and have children with. While parenting is of course a blessing, early fatherhood or motherhood, when you don’t have the means, can be devastating. I simply wish this boy knew that he could’ve not had sex with this girl until he was ready in life—and her the same. 

I find myself now asking men I’m interested in where they stand on abortion. In a culture where women are coerced into being cool girls—to not ask the guy she’s crushing on for a relationship, to not make him wait for sex, to not ask him to wear protection, to not ask him to stay the night, to not ask him to pick her up and drop her off after dates, to not ask whether he likes her romantically, to not ask if he wants marriage and kids someday—one of the most radical things you as a woman can do, whether you’re pro choice or not, is ask a man: “If I get pregnant, would you be ready to be a father?”