Episode 15: Reproductive Sovereignty as a Team Effort ft. Elsa Irle, Astrologer, Energy Worker & Women's Reproductive Health Advocate
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Sureya: “Abortion has been a women's issue. These are not just women's issues. These are also very necessary for men to be involved in. This is a human issue, and I am a huge believer that our bodies are designed to be at choice as to if and when we create life.
Conceiving is not just this thing that happens on accident. Like, it happens so frequently that you would think it is, but actually, it's not super easy to just get pregnant on accident. If you're paying attention to your body, if you are in communication with your lover, if you understand how your body works and you're working with various different methods, we absolutely do have the power to be at choice as to when and if we conceive.
And so this is information that I think is super empowering, super essential for everyone to be aware of, so we can start decreasing our dependence on thinking that we need external technologies in order to prevent this. I'm absolutely a believer that every woman has the right to a safe abortion, and I also believe that we need to stop leaving that entirely in the hands of our government and giving our power away in that way.”
Elsa: “I got pregnant on the second day of my period and I was like, ‘How could this have happened? How could this possibly have happened?’ I was smart enough to be tracking things and I was using an app at that time on my first edition iPad, cuz it was 2013 and I was tracking the dates that I had sex.
And my partner had gone away for a while and then I realized I was pregnant. We were so careful during the times that I was in my ovulation window to use condoms and we only had unprotected sex around my period. So it was boiled down to, I actually got pregnant at a time that I really thought that was not possible from everything that I had educated myself about the menstrual cycle. And, a friend of mine came forward and sent me an article about lunar ovulation, which I had never heard of, but I've been in astrologer for 20 years and was deeply immersed in understanding the cycles and rhythms of the planets and how they affect us as humans. So this made a lot of sense to me.”
Elsa: “I'm not a trained medical professional, but I know my body better than any of these practitioners do. And it's my responsibility to continue deepening that relationship and learning the wisdom of my body and listening to my body so that I can guide this process as best I can with the help of practitioners who I do trust, who do feel like they know what they're talking about.”
Sureya: “That's been my experience too. I think that's like a huge crux of this issue here is that we have become disempowered when it comes to having agency over our bodies and our health, and that that's not something that the government can give back to us. And it's not something they could have taken from us, had we, you know, been aware of what we, what they were doing or had we stayed connected to our bodies in that way. It's technically not something that they can take from us. It's been within us all along. So to me, this is a journey of coming home to that innate wisdom that has always been here that we've only lost touch.”
Sureya: “The effects of aborting a pregnancy were put entirely on her body. And this has been the norm. The expectation, like, yeah, of course: she's gonna take the plan B, she's gonna get the abortion, she's gonna take the birth control. Okay. I want everyone to let that sink in, especially the men who have ever subscribed to that way of thinking, and not to guilt you or shame you, but to help you open to a new perspective on how unfair that is, how traumatic that is.
Nobody wants to have an abortion. We wanna have them as an option. We don't want that to be the preventative. You know, we wanna have a way that we go about that, to prevent that at all costs and by men not choosing to play a role in this for so long beyond some of them being willing to wear condoms. Which on a whole, side note, a lot of men really argue about wearing condoms when women request it.
And then some men getting vasectomies, which by the way, a vasectomy is a much less invasive process than a woman having her tubes tied. And then a very small percentage of men learning the art of seminal retention and the journey of a man learning to retain his seed causes no harm to his body and actually opens up an entirely new realm of pleasure, whereas the things that we have been expecting and asking women to do for so long cause enormous harm to the system.”
Sureya: “When you have a non-ejaculatory orgasm, you are taking edging at one huge, further step where you're reversing the flow of energy and circulating it through your whole body and having a full body orgasm.
So it's very different than just choosing not to come. It's not that you have to give up your orgasm. And even if you just got to the point where you knew how to choose when and if you're going to ejaculate, even if you don't master the non-ejaculatory orgasm, that's still very helpful, for preventing pregnancy.
So this is about cultivating a very deep relationship with your sexual energy and recognizing that ejaculation is a function that is intended for creating life. And most orgasms are not happening with the intention of creating life. And so if we can be more intentional about that and be at choice as to what type of experience we want to have, that can be really helpful.”