'Design Mom' Gabrielle Blair turns to politics

After 16 years of making a name for herself as a blogger and interior design expert, Design Mom has written her reproductive health manifesto.< /p>

Last month, wearing a vintage red velvet tuxedo, Gabrielle Blair took the stage at Alt Summit, a design conference at Chelsea Piers in New York. His/Her message: don't send a woman to do a man's job - the job of preventing unwanted pregnancies.

Ms. Blair, 48, was one of the first blogging mums in the early 2000s. In 2019, she appeared at Alt, which she co-founded, to give a talk on “connectivity, learning about yourself and your company". This time, she told the audience, “I just want men to ejaculate responsibly. It's a very small request. It's not hard to do."

Ms. Blair invoked the title of her new book, "Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion," which debuted this week at No. 2 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.With her publication, she added a reproductive rights activist to her biography, which also includes Mormon, mother of six children and a home improvement expert.

The book, which some critics have called a manifesto and a treatise, is a clear departure from the work the devoted public expected by Mrs. Blair. Her blog, Design Mom, was launched in 2006 and became a huge success as well as her family's main source of income. Time magazine named it the best parenting website of 2010, and the family Blair has been featured on HGTV's House Hunters International, an experience she has also written about.Joanna Gaines, the famed HGTV set designer, debuted in a blog interview in 2012, long before "Fixer Upper" was a spark in her eye. Before the pandemic, Alt Summit attracted thousands of crafty bloggers for multi-day events at $1,000 per ticket. Ms Blair's first bestseller, "Design Mom: How to Live With Kids: A Room-By-Room Guide", was published in 2015.

The site still attracts around 150,000 unique visitors per month, a fraction of the millions she reaches on Twitter and Instagram, where she recounts the restoration of a 17th century house she and her husband bought in 2019 in Argentan, in France. "I'm known for a lot of different things," she said.

Ms. Blair acknowledged the gap between his two books. The first book was "telling you, 'this is how to live with children,'" and the new book is "'this is how to avoid having them,'" she said.

His big pivot started in 2018 with a Twitter feed of 63 tweets, the basis of "Ejaculate Responsibly". Ms Blair introduced herself in the first tweet, using her background as a Mormon mother as a selling point for the deliberately simple thesis that followed: men need to stop putting the burden of birth control on women and stop get pregnant when they don't. t want to be. This will eliminate the need for abortions.

ImageMs. Blair and her husband, Ben Blair, had signed a contract to write a parenting advice book, which she put off to work on "Ejaculating Responsibly." Credit... Matthew Avignone for The New York Times