SATIRE NEWS: If Females Could Get Pregnant, There’d Be An Abortion Clinic On Every Coral

Despite the tide of aquatic opinion flowing in favor of reproductive rights for all, marine society still gives male seahorses very little say over what happens to their own bodies. Instead, we are treated as passive baby-making machines. Meanwhile, if it were the female seahorses who could get pregnant, there’d probably be an abortion clinic on every coral.

I guarantee that if female members of our species were responsible for bringing new life into the world, they wouldn’t be forced to propel themselves across treacherous waters in search of a sketchy back-reef abortion. Nor would they be expected to pay out of pocket to have the morning-after pill shipped to them from the Gulf of Mexico.

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. 

As a male seahorse, I deserve to be seen as more than just a curly-tailed egg receptacle. 

If females experienced gestation, the musculoskeletal contractions during birth alone would be celebrated as feats of nautical strength. Forcing a female seahorse to go through with labor against her will would be punished to the fullest extent of maritime law. But when we do it, it is simply our intrinsic duty as male Syngnathus hippocampi living under an oppressive oceanographic system. 

I already know what the critics will say: “If males don’t want to get pregnant, then they shouldn’t engage in the courtship rituals of their species during breeding season.” Well, I have a hard time believing that if female seahorses got pregnant, they’d be told the same. Even without a mate around, females can’t seem to go more than a few hours without rapidly ejecting gametes from their ovipositor into the water column. In fact, no one blinks an eye when they flaunt their sexuality in public waters! Talk about a double standard.

Typically, I try not to acknowledge watery arguments from the puritanical sponges that preach asexual reproduction. It’s frankly no one’s business who I let into my seagrass bed. But if females needed them, seahorse contraceptives would be easy to procure. 

On the contrary, I don’t know a single male seahorse who hasn’t spent several excruciating minutes worrying that he was pregnant.

Don’t get me wrong—bringing new oceanic life into the world is a uniquely profound and rewarding experience that I might like to try some day. I’m only 4 months old, and who knows where I will be in another several weeks when I’m sexually mature? What I resent is that the same pressure to breed is not put on females, who merely get to deposit their eggs and swim away unaffected. 

Frankly, I’m sick and tired of being subjected to the whims of a bunch of old out-of-touch barnacles.

Male seahorses deserve to decide for themselves if and when they incubate their young. Because if females could get pregnant, seahorses wouldn’t be able to wrap their prehensile tails around a coral branch without hitting an abortion clinic.