The Miraculous Rediscovery of Women

By Nate Hochman

Thursday, May 19, 2022

 

Who can give birth? It’s a query that most people in most places could answer quite easily for the vast majority of human civilization: women. But that parochial assumption has been called into question in recent years. In place of antiquated terms such as “woman” and “mother,” progressives have opted for gender-neutral neologisms such as “menstruating person” and “birthing people.” Washington Post columnists declared that “it’s time to ‘unsex’ pregnancy.” The Biden administration’s 2021 budget proposal replaced the term “mother” with “birthing person.” The Department of Health and Human Services circulated memos instructing employees to “use gender-neutral salutations and forms of address only” and to “avoid using masculine or feminine pronouns (he, she) to refer to individuals whose gender or preferred pronouns are unknown.” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, when asked during her confirmation hearings to define “woman,” refused, saying, “I’m not a biologist.”

 

Today, however, something magical and unexpected has happened. Democratic politicians and progressive tastemakers alike seem to have rediscovered what Medieval peasants understood a millennium ago: Women exist. And not just that — women give birth. This miraculous reversal has happened against the backdrop of Roe v. Wade’s potentially imminent demise. At the very moment when American voters may once again have a say in the nation’s abortion laws, the “war on women” is back as though it had never left.

 

In a speech delivered soon after the leak of the draft Roe/Dobbs opinion, Kamala Harris declared that “Roe v. Wade in its power has protected a woman’s right, her right to make decisions about her own body for nearly half a century.” The vice president continued:

 

Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women. How dare they? How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?

 

In the Senate, Harris’s Democratic colleagues made a doomed last-ditch effort to reintroduce the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would enshrine the right to an abortion for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy, up until the baby’s head crowns. When the effort failed, President Biden released a statement that “this failure to act comes at a time when women’s constitutional rights are under unprecedented attack.” In the House, Nancy Pelosi slammed the potential overturn of Roe as “an action which is the culmination of Republicans’ decades-long crusade against women’s fundamental freedoms.”

 

In the progressive media, New York Times opinion columnist Gail Collins rebuked the conservative majority on the Supreme Court in her column “Don’t Be Fooled. It’s All About Women and Sex”: “The Supreme Court’s Trump-constructed majority will reject the by-now-longstanding understanding that a woman has the constitutional right to decide whether she wants to end a pregnancy.” In the Washington Post, once-conservative columnist Jen Rubin decreed that “the effort to investigate and enforce a law criminalizing a woman’s reproductive decisions necessarily becomes an exercise in authoritarian excess.” Slate legal writer Dahlia Lithwick fumed about the “men — because it’s pretty much always men” who “gaslit” women into believing that “red-state legislatures — which are pretty much always controlled by men” were not going to ban abortion: “Spectacularly stupid men gloat about the end of women’s freedom and then turn around and deride women as hysterical for worrying publicly about their freedom.”

 

And now, the rediscovery of women seems to have moved beyond the issue of abortion. “Imagine a World Where Men Had to Breastfeed Their Babies,” an essay by New York Times contributing opinion writer Elizabeth Spiers, appeared in Wednesday’s paper. Spiers wrote that the recent baby-formula shortage shows “the ways in which new motherhood, venerated in theory, is not fully supported in practice.”

 

What progressives have rediscovered, then, is that men and women are different. They are distinct entities — not just biologically, but in every sense of the word. That’s not a bad thing; in fact, properly understood, these differences are profoundly beautiful. Men and women are made for each other. On the deepest spiritual level, the tragedy of the recent effort to “deconstruct gender” — transforming pregnancy into a genderless function of “personhood” and blurring the lines between men’s and women’s relationship to children, the family, and one another — is that it robs both genders of their distinctive characteristics, of the very heart of what and who they are. To abolish difference is to destroy all that makes us human, reducing us to so many faceless “persons” in the name of an abstract standard of “equity.” So yes: Women, in the final analysis, exist. Speaking as the son of a woman, I’m glad they do. It’s too bad that it took something as gruesome as abortion-on-demand for progressives to realize as much.