Default Male Lens and Abortion Myths: Two Feminist Snapshots That Fired Me Up

Why do people still say women make “careless” decisions about abortion – and how can you shut that argument down fast? And what does it have to do with a shocking PhD thesis on endometriosis?

In this episode of The Scenic Route, you’ll get:

• A toolkit to counter the “careless abortion” myth from three angles: logic, evidence, and power.
• Evidence-based insights you can drop in conversation to cut through opinion with data.
• A clearer lens on structural bias – why women’s pain is underfunded and dismissed, and how the “default male” still shapes medicine.
• Practical ways to spot and challenge bias in your own life, research, and everyday conversations.
  
  

Mentioned in this episode:

• Criado Perez, C. (2019). Invisible women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men. Abrams Press.
• Foster, D. G., Biggs, M. A., Ralph, L., Gerdts, C., Roberts, S., & Glymour, M. M. (2018). Socioeconomic outcomes of women who receive and women who are denied wanted abortions in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 108(3), 407–413. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2017.304247
• National Institutes of Health. (2023). Estimates of funding for various research, condition, and disease categories (RCDC). Retrieved from https://report.nih.gov/funding/categorical-spending

By the end of this episode, you’ll have the arguments, the evidence, and the confidence to dismantle abortion myths and to recognise structural bias whenever women’s health and autonomy are sidelined.

👉 Hit play and add these tools to your feminist toolkit.

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Visit jenniferwalter.me – your cosy corner where recovering perfectionists, misfits, and those done pretending to be fine find space to breathe, dream, and create real change."

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to the Scenic Route
• 1:39 Endometriosis Research and Male Perspective
• 6:07 Debunking "Careless" Abortion Arguments
• 13:45 Understanding Morality as Social Control
• 16:31 Your Toolkit for Challenging Gender Bias
• 19:01 Closing Thoughts

Transcript

JenniferWalter: 0:00

I promise you, by the end of this episode, you'll never hear someone say women make careless decisions about abortion without immediately knowing exactly how to demolish that argument with facts, logic, and a little righteous anger. But first, let me tell you about a research study that made me want to throw my laptop out of the window and burn things. There's a different way to think about mental health. And it starts with slowing down. Sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home. And that's exactly where we're taking the scenic route. Hi, I'm Jennifer Walter, host of the Scenic Rad Podcast. Think of me as your sociologist, sister in arms, and rebel with many causes. Together, we're blending critical thinking with compassion, mental health with a dash of rebellion, and personal healing with collective change. We're trading perfectionism for possibility and toxic positivity for messy growth. Each week, we're exploring the path to better mental health and social transformation. And yes, by the way, pretty crystals are totally optional. You ready to take the scenic route? Let's walk this path together. Hi, welcome back to Scenic Route, where we want to better understand why the world works the way it does. I'm your host Jen, and this week I'm serving off a double shot of feminist fury, so consider yourself worn. Two completely different things landed on my desk this week. That got me fired up and made me wonder things. Then, as the often reasonable adult that I am, I stepped back, paused, and looked at them together. Not as single cases, but as patterned. And I realized they were telling the same story about how our society treats women's bodies. So let's go. So part one. I stumbled across a twenty like don't I don't even remember what I Googled, but it was the result of a Google search. I stumbled across a 2019 doctoral thesis from the University of Zurich, which is also um the university I did my bachelor's at. And the title alone made me want to like hurl my laptop across the room. The title is I ced you not. Does endometriosis affect sexual activity and satisfaction of the male partner? Yeah. Okay, so let's like recap our knowledge of endometriosis, right? It's a disease where tissues, where tissue that's supposed to align your uterus grows in random places in your body, on your ovaries, bowel, bladder, sometimes even in your diaphragm. And every month it swells and it bleeds inside your body or inside your muscle tissue with nowhere to go. The pain can be so severe that women vomit, pass out, can't work, can't walk. Like we're talking panic attack level pain. And it affects one, roughly one in ten women. That's about 109 million 190 million worldwide. There you go. It's one of the leading causes in infertility, but it doesn't stop her. It causes bowel obstructions, bladder dysfunction, and it increases your risk of certain cancers. Some women lose organs, and it takes an average of seven to ten years to get properly diagnosed because women's pain is often dismissed as normal period pain or just in their head. So you would think with a condition this widespread and devastating, research funding would be like plentiful. No, wrong, wrong, wrong, of course not. Right? In 2023, the National Institute of Health in the US allocated just 29 million for endometrosis. That's roughly about 0.038% of its budget. But hey, maybe just money is money is tight, one could say. But meanwhile, erectile dysfunction research pulled in six times more funding between 2019 and 2023. So yeah. And it doesn't really stop in the US, of course. Globally, only about 5% of all health RD funding goes to women's health. And that's not just like gynecology, it's for everything related to women's health. So against that backdrop, researchers, uh doctoral candidates could decide to contribute something to actually enhance this field. But no, no, no. This one dude, he went and thought, hey, you know what I could do? I could study how this devastating condition affects men's sexual satisfaction. Like, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Look, studying how illness affects families can be legitimate research. But here's the thing endometriosis research is already criminally underfunded. Women are already told their pain is normal or it's in their heads for years before getting a diagnosis. And when researchers finally do pay attention, the question becomes, but what about the men? So this is part of what Caroline uh Criado Perez calls the default male problem in her book, Invisible Women. Go read that. She shows how women's experiences are consistently filtered through someone else's lens, usually male, usually external. She also reminds us that until 1993, women weren't even systematically included in US clinical drug trials. That means modern medicine was literally built on male data, treating women as deviations from the norm. And if you ask why, the reason that's often quoted is well, hormones. Hormones make it really difficult to do drug trials. Well, no shit. We all know hormones are the fucking obstacle of all everything in our lives. We know. Thank you. Anyway, uh, so research finally pays attention to endometrosis. And the question is, what about the men? Okay, hold on to that frustration because we're adding something to it. And we're gonna connect it to something that at first looks different, but is parts too. Okay, so figure like pictures. I'm already fired up and want to burn things because I found this endometrosis paper. And then because the universe has a twist sense of humor, I stumble into an online argument. So, disclaimer, these days I rarely do online arguments because 99.9 of cases, that's completely waste of your time. I stumbled into this argument because I also didn't expect it. It was on LinkedIn on all places. Like, I'm not going on Reddit to start arguments, I know better, but LinkedIn of all places, and it's about a topic that I just really cannot shut up, and that's women's healthcare and women's right to choose what's right for their body. So it was basically a post on like how a lot of policymakers want to go back to the 80s because the 80s were such a great time for everyone. And this post was kind of like listing things why the 80s were not a great time for women. And then someone commented on the post saying, well, but the abortion rate, something like abortion rate was much low, much lower in the 80s. That was better. Um, then he concluded his argument saying, oh, women just like uh get abortions carelessly these days, like it's nothing. And like the German word he used is um leichtfertig. I don't know if there's a literal English translation, but it's kind of like careless. You you make this decision carelessly, like it's nothing. It's kind of like, oh, should I get like, should I wear my blue or my red purse to get an abortion? Like that kind of sentiment. Okay. So no, of course I could have scrolled on, but I didn't. So I dismantle it in tree moves. I'm gonna show you how you can do the same. So I took one for the team, okay? Well, move one logic. So that person, of course, as everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who had an abortion carelessly, who just kind of like thought, oh, this is I don't want to have this baby, I just get an abortion. Okay, even if this had happened, and if you really know this person, sure, could be, I don't know, what kind of friends you have. But going, taking one case and pretending it represents all, making a rule out of one case, it's what we call an inductive fallacy. It's like saying Peter didn't finish this book, so this book gets finished by no one, right? We all laugh at that example, but when it comes to women's reproductive decisions, I don't know. People forget how logic works. Mind-blowing. So we have inductive fallacy. Now out the window, go back, next. Move to research. Well, we actually do have a lot of research and studies on the circumstances, and they show that a vast majority of cases in cases, abortions are performed after very careful consideration and under difficult circumstances. Those could be financial hardship, health risks, violence, lack of support, and so on. So the whole process of getting an abortion and ending a pregnancy is usually associated with low stress, anxiety, and in a lot of cases, considerable social and psychological strain. It's anything far. It's far from a light-hearted decision. Um, we have one study, the turnaway study, who followed women for five years after an abortion or being denied one. Let's be real, five years is a long time. That's longer than most of you keep your fucking phones. So 95% said abortion was the right decision years later. Women who were denied abortions were more likely to end up in poverty, stay in abusive relationships, and face health problems. That does not sound careless to me. That reads more like survival. Move three, moral. So we have the moral component of this. Calling women careless isn't about facts. We've established that. It's about it's a power move. It's saying women can't be trusted as reliable decision makers for their own lives, it's undermining autonomy and it's deeply infantilizing, treating grown women as if they're children who need supervision, guidance, or correction, rather than adults capable of weighing complex circumstances. And usually in the moral move uh step of the process is usually where the harm argument comes in. Opponents of abortion often say, but oh, but abortion like ends the life of the baby, it harms the baby, and like you should do no harm, kind of like the moral argument of that. And that sounds simple, but morally and philosophically, it's really not. Because the key debate is who is recognized as a full moral subject with rights. Right? So yeah. That's that's the truth, right? And for me, a pregnant woman's personhood and autonomy are undisputed. She's a citizen, a rights bearing a subject, a woman, a human being whose decision shape her entire life. And that's not just me, but that's the key for most religion laws and like philosophies. Defeatus, on the other hand, has more contested oral status. Different traditions answer this differently. Some religions grant full personhood at conception, others at viability, others at birth. And of course, laws also vary across countries. But I mean, just think about granting full personhood at conception, that would mean you would owe child support not from the moment the child is born, from the moment of conception. I don't think that's the law in any country. Like, makes no sense. So it's either and or it's not, we're not cherry-picking here. Okay. So the harm claim only works if you start from the premise that's if that the features that fetus has equal or greater moral status than a woman. But that's not a universally agreed fact. It's a belief rooted in a very particular moral culture and religious tradition. So when people say women abort carelessly, they're not making a new, a neutral moral claim. They're deploying morality as a tool of social control, one that infantilizes women, delegitimizes, oh dear, that's another English word, that's killing me, their decision making and upholds a hierarchy where women's autonomy is never fully their own. So, and now we have these two stories side by side. One about edimetrosis research, one about abortion debates. They all look very different, but they're driven by the same kind of like undercurrent. Women's experiences, pain, women's decisions making are not valued in themselves. Women's reproductive decisions are scrutinized and regulated, women's medical conditions are studied for their impact on others. And this is not coincidence, this is structural. We have, um, for example, Emil Durkheim, one of sociology's founders, called morality a social fact. In other words, morality isn't just about personal conscience, it's something society creates collectively. It exists outside of us, it pressures us, and it tells us what counts as right or wrong. Its function, Durkheim argued, is to hold society together, to keep order. But here's the thing: order is never neutral, right? Some social facts don't come from nowhere. They're shaped in a world already structured by inequality. So when the moral story about abortion becomes women are careless, that's not a timeless truth. It's society enforcing an old pattern. Women's autonomy is always conditional, always subject to external approval. And if we, for example, add Foucault into the mix, if Durkheim shows us that morality is collective, Foucault shows us how morality is used as discipline. Power doesn't operate through policies or laws essentially, necessarily. It runs through everyday language, institutions, research, and norms. So if we call women careless and act as this is not a personal opinion, it has the tendency to become a disciplinary tool that shapes how women are treated, studies, and even how they see themselves. So if we look at Borkheim and Foucault together, we kind of like see a bigger picture, right? Morality as a social construction that holds society together, but one that's deeply tied to power. And in case of women's health, that power works to sideline, to question and to control. And you know, these two stories, there aren't just random irritations. They're symptoms of the same deeper structure, a society that systematically filters women's bodies through suspicion, neglect, and control. And we see this not just in these two cases, we see it in the whole trad wife argument. We see it in this new resurgence of women should the women's place is is home. So that's that, and as always, I just don't want to show you what's wrong. I was kind of like, What is it? Okay, how what can you do with this? So here's kind of like your toolkit if you encounter something like this, you can do the logic check. When someone generalizes about women, ask what's your sample size? One friend of a friend, a friend, a friend of a friend, a headline, actual data. And spoiler, nine times out of ten, it's just kind of like vibes dressed up as evidence. You can do the evidence check. Look at who's asking the research questions, whose pers whose perspective is centered, and whose perspective is missing altogether. You can use this episode as a conversation starter, not to like change minds overnight, but to plant seeds, right? Because in my experience, every revolution starts with like a raised eyebrow, a good story, or being around a fire burning shit. That's deeply healing. And you can do a personal audit, be brutally honest. Do you secretly hold women to a higher bar of proof? Do you expect women to explain their choices in like a TED talk while men just kind of like get a free pass? And like, oh, why did you why did you did that? Why did you do that? And then when he does it, it's just kind of like, oh, he did that. Okay. Yes, congratulations. You found a cultural bug in your brain, and it's time to uninstall. So listen, the singing round isn't always comfortable. Sometimes it takes us through anger, frustration, and grief, but it helps us to see the hidden patterns shaping our world. Sometimes they're hidden or less hidden, depend on me. You get it, right? So today we'll look at two stories, like a doctoral thesis on endometrosis and the entire old abortion map of the careless women. And found their chapter of the same book, a society that systematically sidelines women's autonomy and experiences. The next time you hear someone claim women make careless choices about abortion, you'll know exactly what to say. And the next time you see a research, a research that sidelines women's pain or women's experience, you'll know to call it out for what it is. So thank you for taking the Cine Ground with me today. Until next time, and keep asking all the uncomfortable questions. And just like that, we've reached the end of another journey together on the Cine Group Podcast. Thank you for spending time with us. Curious for more stories or in search of the resources mentioned in today's episode? Visit us at scenigrouppodcast.com for everything you need. And if you're ready to embrace your scenic group, I've got something special for you. Step off the beaten path with my scenic root affirmation card deck. It's crafted for those moments when you're seeking courage, yearning to trust your inner boy and eager to carve out a path authentically, unmistakably yours. Pick your scenic root affirmation day and let it support you. Excited about where your journey might lead? I certainly am. Remember, the scenic road is not just about a destination, but the experiences, learnings, and joy we discover along the way. Thank you for being here, and I look forward to seeing you on the Scenic Root again.