Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an organization that supports anti-abortion female politicians, emphasized to me that women do have different and often much more personal perspectives on pregnancy from men. This is one reason she believes it’s important for groups like the Susan B. Anthony List to have female leadership. “Women are uniquely situated to talk about this issue, because we have babies,” she said. Still, she also sees men as important allies. “You don’t have to earn your right to speak out on a great human-rights battle,” she told me. The entire abortion debate “comes down to one fundamental question about whether this is another human or not,” she said, “and if it is another human, then we have a serious, serious problem on our hands, and everyone should speak to it.” If an abortion were truly just a simple medical procedure that only women and people with uteruses could need, like a hysterectomy, “sure, men could be supportive. There wouldn’t be this huge controversy over who gets to talk and who doesn’t,” she added. (A representative for the National Right to Life Committee offered a similar sentiment: “We welcome men into the conversation because we see this as a human-rights issue.”)

Dannenfelser also said she finds the idea that abortion is an issue men should weigh in on only with their votes or donations “insulting.” “We want your money, we want your emotional support. But especially your money, and then just shut up and go away. I think a lot of women have been on the other side of that attitude,” she said, “and I reject it wherever I see it.” Ultimately, men and women can serve the anti-abortion cause in “complementary” ways, Dannenfelser told me. “More support is better, from both [men and women].”

Abortion-rights activists, meanwhile, have recently been calling for a level of male involvement similar to that of the anti-abortion movement—and expressing dismay at the lack of male voices speaking out about how abortion has affected their lives. Last month, Jezebel published an essay titled “How Do We Make Cis Men Give a Shit About Abortion?” The New York Times opinion section ran a column urging men to think about their own precarious legal situation in an unwanted pregnancy should abortion become illegal. Alison McQuade, a social-media consultant based in Washington, D.C., tweeted in May, “Men are so eager to join in the ‘WE are pregnant!’ and ‘WE are having a baby!’ party, but suddenly become deafeningly silent when it’s ‘WE had an abortion.’” In an essay for The Bitter Southerner titled “Southern Men: Where Y’all At?,” the Atlanta-based writer Gray Chapman called for men to join the battle to preserve abortion rights in Georgia, because abortion, or the lack of access to it, could have significant repercussions in their lives too:

One in four American women will have an abortion by age 45, which means most of y’all know and love more than a few women whose lives today are possible only thanks to the freedom they had to make choices about their own reproductive futures. It’s likely, too, that a woman’s abortion has helped make possible your own lives and livelihoods as you know them today.

Many men, Chapman went on, “say they’re hesitant or just plain scared to speak up about this stuff. They feel it’s not their place to say anything, or worse, that they’ll say the wrong thing. That’s understandable, albeit sort of a cop-out.”