A Very Short Story

I visited Dublin this summer, and went clubbing my last night there. I quickly became friends with a couple lads at the club. When they learned I was from Canada, one of their first questions was what the age of consent is.

Later on that night, they talked about their excitement for the legalization of abortion in Ireland. Now they felt more free to have unprotected sex and knock up girls without consequences. "Sex with a condom isn't real sex," one of them told me.

I tried to laugh it off, tried to play it cool. I'm just a foreigner, after all. But inside I felt gross.

This story isn't really about Ireland, of course, because there are men with the same attitude around the world.

In the real world, beyond the war of words, abortion doesn't empower women. It empowers "bros" like this.