Books like Ejaculate Responsibly — picked by fans

This book is a must-read memoir for anyone, and certainly any woman, who will come in contact with our nation’s healthcare system.

The dark humor and excellent storytelling are the perfect soil to build a heartbreaking picture of the bias and misogyny that lurks in a woman’s most vulnerable moments. Sarah Ramey’s perspective on the healthcare system makes me want to weep and then do so much better.

We typically think of childbirth as a pain women must simply get through. Elizabeth Davis and Debra Pascali-Bonaro offer a wildly different perspective in this read. They show how birth can be a blissful, ecstatic experience—and why women have been robbed of this experience.

Reading this book not only made me excited about the prospect of giving birth but also helped me challenge the outdated conventional wisdom of "no pain, no gain."

Women's genitals are too often painted as passive, empty holes. When we think of them, we think of the vagina rather than the vulva or clitoris. In this book, Irigaray offers a simple reframe: Our bodies are not zero. They are two.

Analyzing the symbolism of the female body, Irigaray challenges patriarchal logic. This book helped me become sexual in a way that honored my own body rather than submitting to the erasure so endemic to our culture.

Female orgasms are not the mysteries society makes them out to be. This book illuminates how they work while debunking the prevalent, insidious myth that women's bodies are poorly designed.

It taught me about the evolutionary forces shaping our sexuality, the types of orgasms we can enjoy, and the frequently underestimated expansiveness of women's sexuality. 

What happens to women who can’t get the abortions that they want or need? For most of our history, the answers were anecdotal and speculative until Diana Greene Foster and a team of fellow researchers followed one thousand women, some of whom obtained abortions, some of whom could not do so.

The answer is a triumph of social science reporting. By almost every measure, those women who could not access abortion care fared worse ten years later, and many of the years in between, than those women who were able to make their own choices about their bodies and their lives.

What I loved about the book was how transparent Foster was about the research design for the study and how intertwined she showed that abortion is in so many aspects of women’s lives. 

Hartmann’s book is a classic and is in its third edition.

This is an essential reading for anyone who cares about feminist politics and abortion rights because it provides a global historical context. Laws and attitudes on reproductive rights differ dramatically across the world – where one country might restrict abortion and contraception, another country might grant easy access to contraception and abortion.

This book shows the dark history of global population control efforts that used abortion and contraception to attempt to lower birthrates in poor countries. She reminds us that, across the world, governments and other organizations have used heavy-handed tactics to force contraception and abortion on some people, especially in countries where there are worries about overpopulation.

Hartmann’s book warns against focusing too narrowly on the right to end a pregnancy, without focusing enough attention on the right to bear children too.

In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Constitution guaranteed a “right to privacy” as it struck down Connecticut’s longstanding ban on the sale and use of birth control. (Amazing trivia: the state legislator who drafted the state’s 1879 anti-contraceptive law was P.T. Barnum.) Garrow’s history recounts the decades-long efforts of Connecticut activists to challenge the restriction, and how lawyers shifted their choice of plaintiffs from doctors asserting the law interfered with their ability to provide medical advice to married women claiming a right to privacy within their marriages. In the years following Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court gradually expanded that novel privacy doctrine, extending it to the intimate decisions of unmarried people, and eventually to cover the right to an abortion with Roe v. Wade.

China's gargantuan size has haunted its efforts to become a modern nation. Anthropologist Greenhalgh argues that in the late 1970s, Chinese rocket scientists, influenced by doomsday policymakers in the West, convinced the Chinese government to impose a one-child family planning program. The draconian enforcement of the one-child policy subjected millions of women to intimate corporeal surveillance that resulted in uncounted numbers of forced abortions, hidden births, and suffering for the masses. By 2016, when the two children policy was instituted, family planning contributed to an unbalanced gender ratio, delayed marriages, and a possibly irreversible population decline. Social engineering is a modus operandi of the Chinese state, and ironically, its most famous strategy threatens the nation's sustainability as a world industrial power.

As I read this book, I realized the more things change, the more they stay the same, particularly when it comes to the battle for reproductive rights. The two women chronicled here were “rivals,” and they were direct opposites when it came to upbringing, personality, and strategic views. But they both were dedicated to making birth control legal in this country – it’s hard to believe that providing it was once a crime – and both fought hard and sacrificed much to achieve that goal. The author shows clearly how history repeats itself: the battles these two women fought mirror current ones over reproductive rights and show that women’s rights are far from guaranteed in any era. 

This book showed me that rivalry and competition can actually fuel a cause and help both participants achieve their goals. In this case, two strong-willed women from widely varied backgrounds had differing opinions… show more.

A friend recommended this book while in high school. I was trying to find more great sci-fi books, and he recommended this one.

It's a bit of a real-world dystopian story, and I apologize for that in advance. Our perspective follows a "Third", or the third-born child in a family. Unfortunately, being a "Third" means not being allowed to exist. It's the sort of dystopian book that could happen; I dread the times such things have happened in real life, and remain hopeful such things do not happen at all.