'Love Is Blind' Illustrates the Problems With Sex Ed & Abortion Conversations in America

At this point, many viewers found themselves wondering, "Have these people ever heard of condoms? Or IUDs? Or numerous other safe, reliable forms of contraception?"

And, well, the answer is yes, as Cortés felt compelled to explain in a social media post.

They "1000%" discussed using condoms, she shared in an Instagram story last week. "But we still saw it as a risk at the time." (Condoms are 98% effective when used properly, according to Planned Parenthood.) Presumably, these conversations occurred off-camera or were left on the cutting room floor.

She also further explained her reluctance to take birth control, saying she is concerned about potential effects it might have on a rare hereditary disorder that affects her blood vessels and spoke about how, as a Latina, she shied away from discussing topics like contraception. She also insisted that she never felt any pressure from McIntyre about her decision.

"We live in a country where sex ed is not the best. Let's be honest," she wrote, hitting the nail on the head. "His willingness to learn and explore further options without any pressure was something I respected and appreciated as a woman." Cortés also said she raised the idea of a vasectomy in part "because I feel like society pushes women to be responsible for these decisions and never men."

In the latest batch of episodes, released Wednesday, McIntyre shares what he has learned about getting a vasectomy. Spoiler alert: He's not into it.

"I didn't realize how actually, like, severe it is," he explains in a confessional. "They go in, they cut a little vein, so when you uh" — he looks around and laughs nervously, apparently unwilling to say "ejaculate" — "it doesn't get her pregnant. It was not what I expected at all.

"I thought it was a quick little tying, put-a-bow on something and you're good to go," he adds. "And then I see it, and I'm like, 'Maybe not…' I don't know if it was something that people went over in school, during normal sex ed. But yeah, never really knew about that."

Although Love Is Blind generally skirts the issue of electoral politics — we never explicitly hear whom anyone voted for in the last election — the show often touches on sensitive cultural issues, and birth control and abortion are topics that have come up repeatedly over the course of the series. The sometimes maddening conversations about these subjects say just as much about the future prospects of the couples having them as the country's state of mind in this peculiar, post-Dobbs moment.

In Season 3, the relationship between Nancy Rodriguez and Bartise Bowden began to unravel during a conversation about their timeline for having kids, which led to discussion of abortion.

Bowden, who was five years younger than his then-fiancée, said that "you can get one pass" if you're young and find yourself dealing with an unplanned pregnancy — but that was it. He found the idea of considering abortion because of a diagnosis such as Down syndrome unthinkable. Rodriguez took a more nuanced view. "I don't think that there's like a number that you can just say, like one time to f--- up" she said. "What if the second time you get raped?"

It was clear that Bowden thought about abortion in reductive, oversimplified terms and hadn't considered the many reasons someone might have one, other than being young and irresponsible. (Even though as of 2020, most women who have abortions already have at least one child, according to statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and a mere 8% are teenagers.) It was either deeply ironic or completely inevitable that Bowden, who ultimately turned Rodriguez down at the altar, unexpectedly became a father shortly after his stint on Love Is Blind. (He also claims his views on abortion have changed.)

It's also worth noting that Season 3 was filmed in Dallas in 2021, the same year Texas instituted a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, a law rooted in faulty ideas about when a "fetal heartbeat" can be detected, and it aired in 2022, a few months after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade. Current Texas law makes no exceptions for rape or incest, and according to one study, an estimated 26,000 Texans have become pregnant as a result of rape since the Dobbs decision.

Many fans have expressed hope that Love Is Blind will relocate to other parts of the country after four seasons in the South — and two in Texas alone — even though culture wars over abortion, birth control, and sexual education are by no means limited to a single geographical region.

Texas also does not prioritize sex education in schools. Parents are required to actively opt in to sex education for their children by providing written permission rather than opting out if they are opposed. The state's updated curriculum, which was instituted in 2022, does not include instruction about consent, sexual orientation, or gender identity, and it emphasizes abstinence.

Season 6 is set in North Carolina, a once-purple Southern state that has lurched rightward the last few election cycles. In 2023, North Carolina set a 12-week limit on most abortions. The state education curriculum stresses abstinence and the importance of sex only within marriage, though this is hardly an anomaly in the United States. Fewer than 50% of adolescents surveyed between 2015 and 2019 reported that they received instruction on how to access birth control before they had sex for the first time, according to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, and "more adolescents reported that they had received instruction about saying no to sex or waiting until marriage than about where to obtain birth control or how to use a condom." Adolescents were also less likely to report receiving instruction on sex education than they had been in 1995.

It's little wonder that McIntyre, and many people like him, have never learned about what really happens when you get a vasectomy — and are more willing to get engaged to a stranger through a wall than use medically accurate terms to describe their own bodily functions.

This season also featured a pod conversation between Jeramey (yes, that's how it's spelled) Lutinski and a woman he was then dating, Sarah Ann Bick, who described herself as politically conservative and shared her stance on abortion. "I am not a person that is like, 'Hell yeah, go get an abortion!' If two people lay down and consensually have sex, I think that you should take responsibility for your actions," she said. "If you are sexually abused or raped and you end up pregnant by someone, I think the option should definitely be there, but I don't think it's used as a form of birth control."

Their conversation, while not exactly romantic, is increasingly typical for people dating in an era of tribal politics. According to a report on dating in America by Match cited by Time, two out of three single women would not date someone with opposing views on abortion "and 13% of active daters in the U.S. — about 9.8 million people — have said that the decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade has made them more hesitant to date." The editorial board of the Washington Post recently argued that political polarization among young people posed a threat to marriage.

Reality TV makes it easy and even tempting to sneer at people like McIntyre and Cortés because of what they don't know or haven't asked. But if anything, they should be praised for their willingness to have open, honest — if occasionally exasperating — conversations about their private life on camera and for acknowledging the biases, blind spots, and fears rooted in their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. If only more of their costars — not to mention countrymen — would do the same.

Then we could rely on Love Is Blind to teach us the things that really matter, like the meaning of "bean dip."

–by Meredith Blake, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

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