Flowchart: “Can I Get Pregnant?”

Learn the biology of your body, according to conservative male lawmakers.

Remember the birds and the bees? The miracle of birth? Forget everything you knew. Turns out there’s a lot more to birthin’ babies than you might have learned in your godless socialist public-school health class. From this weekend’s assertion by Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) that women can’t conceive babies during a “legitimate rape” to Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) saying Monday that he didn’t know of any pregnancies caused by incest or statutory rape, conservative male lawmakers targeting reproductive rights have always held, shall we say, minority views on the biology of all things uterine.

Did you know about women’s natural stress-induced spermicides? Have you ever seen “God’s little protective shield” in a vagina? That’s because they don’t exist—but these legislators don’t know that.

If you’re of the double-X persuasion, all of this might leave you a bit flummoxed as to whether you’ll conceive. Well, don’t worry your pretty little head about it: We’ve collected the basics of reproductive biology according to conservative politicians, in a handy flowchart format. Need to determine your uterus’ destiny? Just ask these men!

Want it in chart form? Click to embiggen:

Interactive production by Tasneem Raja. Want to make your own “Choose Your Own Adventure” flowchart? Check out our GitHub page to fork our code!

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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