You can’t support abortion rights if you don’t know what a woman is

“If men could get pregnant,” Gloria Steinem famously said, “abortion would be a sacrament.” But we live in a new world — one wherein men can get pregnant, which has made things a little bit awkward for those fighting for abortion rights (though they refuse to acknowledge it). Today, it’s important not to exclude “men” from the abortion debate, as “men” can get pregnant too.

“Gentle reminder,” Imani Gandy tweeted last month, “it’s not only women who need abortions.” Gandy is Senior Editor of Law and Policy for Rewire News Group, once called RH Reality Check, Rewire has been focused on the abortion fight and reproductive rights since 2009. Today, they publish articles like, “Medical Students Are ‘Driving’ for Change Over Gender-Inclusive Language,” which tells the story of “Sam,” a trans-identified female whose pregnancy symptoms were, we are told, not taken seriously because she was not a “cis woman.” Rewire writer Alys Brooks concludes that “Sam’s story illustrates not only the high stakes of accurately communicating a patient’s gender and their sex assigned at birth, but also the need for health-care providers to factor those details into clinical decision-making.”

Medical students are “driving and demanding” changes to the med school curriculum that “better accounts for transgender patients,” Brooks reports. Which includes “degendering”: replacing terms like “pregnant women” with “pregnant people.”

Biology professor’s like Karen Hales, who is employed at Davidson College in North Carolina, have moved towards replacing “mother” and “father” with “egg parent” and “sperm parent.”

In truth, “Sam” had failed to inform the nurse that she was female, identifying herself as “transgender” and, even worse, his medical records showed she was a “man.”

To me, this exemplifies the false propanganda pushed by trans activists and the complicit media, constantly claiming incidents of “transphobia,” which are, in fact, simply about either people who identify as transgender being correctly sexed, or about people lying about their sex, thereby confusing the sane.

“Sam” was not treated ineffectively at the hospital because she claims to be “transgender,” but because it is imperative that medical professionals know the sex of their patients, and “Sam” had been informed by the government and trans activists that it was not only acceptable but necessary to her survival and happiness that she lie about her sex.

The notion that what is needed is to “degender” (which actually means “desex”) patients is ludicrous. Health care professionals need basic information about a patient’s biology/sex, easily communicated by using the (correct) language that already exists: female/male, woman/man, he/she. Imposing gender identity ideology on medicine and biology is clearly confusing, not clarifying, matters.

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On Saturday, thousands gathered across America to protest Senate Bill 8, which was passed in Texas last month and allows people to sue anyone who helps a woman get an abortion after six weeks. While the conversation about abortion should be extended beyond the “legal” vs “illegal” one — a conversation too complex for this particular piece, but that I will say is oversimplified and limited by the notion that women should be reliant on the medical establishment in order to have autonomy over their bodies and reproductive choices — I of course disagree with a law allowing those who “help” women get abortions to be sued. But what is worse is the fact that so many of those fighting this legislation refuse to say that this is an issue affecting only women.

If you can’t understand or say that abortion only impacts women, you cannot fight effectively for abortion rights.

There is a reason men have attempted to control women’s bodies, autonomy, and reproduction all these years, and that is because of biology. In an evolutionary sense, men need to know if their offspring is indeed their offspring, in order to stick around. They have an evolutionary drive to spread their seed, as it were, and they don’t (again, in an evolutionary sense, perhaps not an ideal/moral one) wish to invest their time in a family that isn’t “theirs.” This is why men decided to keep women in the home and out of public life, gallivanting with other men who might impregnate them. If women have control over their reproductive choices, it limits men’s ability to control women and keep them dependent/in the home, tied up with baby-making/raising.

I am oversimplifying, but the point I am trying to make is that only females can get pregnant, which is why men have tried to control their bodies and lives, historically, and is the basis for women’s historic oppression.

Women were never kept in the home, their autonomy limited, because they grew their hair long, wore skirts, put lipstick on, or named themselves “Caitlin” or “Alana.” Nor have women ever been able to opt out of historical oppression by wearing pants or cutting their hair short. Their status remains vulnerable because they are biologically female. Modern, Western civilization and legislation has protected women from institutional oppression, but the fact of pregnancy still means we may be vulnerable to, well, having little control over our lives. Abortion and our ability to control if and when we get pregnant offers us some control over our life circumstances and freedom.

This all seems like basic feminist information, but has become invisibilized by trans activism and its woke disciples. At abortion rallies across the nation, trans activists insisted on disrupting what should be unequivocally woman-centred activism to remind participants that this was not just a women’s issue as “men need abortions too.” In Washington, trans-identified athlete and activist, Schuyler Bailar, said:

“This is a women’s issue, and it is also a transgender man’s issue. It is also a nonbinary person’s issue. It is also a gender queer, gender fluid, transmasculine person’s issue. This is about all of us.”

And, yes, pregnancy and therefore abortion could well affect anyone who identifies as any of these things, but that still doesn’t mean men need abortions. It just means only females will ever want to access an abortion, making Bailar’s entire statement unnecessary. Pregnancy doesn’t care how you feel about gender roles or about how you identify. The only thing that matters is your biology.

You might think it is merely “polite” or “inclusive” to discuss pregnancy and abortion in gender neutral terms, or to remind people that “men can get pregnant too,” but what you lose in doing so is massive: why this matters and is a fight in the first place. It is also, of course, embarrassing and farcical, and makes a mockery of women’s rights advocates. Who could possibly take seriously an activist (or reporter, or politician, or academic, or health authority) who demands female autonomy while also insisting that “men can become pregnant”?

Young women in particular have completely lost the history of and context for the women’s movement, and, as a result, are losing hard fought for rights. That they’ve allowed themselves to be bamboozled by a group of narcissists who have zero interest in women’s rights and are so privileged they can manage to occupy their time with academic notions of “gender,” rather than the material circumstances of their lives, is shameful, and demonstrates how thoroughly out of touch they are with the current and past real life struggles of women across the globe.

Erasing women from the fight for reproductive rights should be sacrilege, but instead it has become doctrine. Women’s rights will continue to disappear in front of our eyes so long as women continue to go along with this nonsense ideology. If you can’t even acknowledge what a woman is and what rights are particular to females, your role in this fight is a joke.

Meghan Murphy

Founder & Editor

Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist from Vancouver, BC. She has been podcasting and writing about feminism since 2010 and has published work in numerous national and international publications, including The Spectator, UnHerd, Quillette, the CBC, New Statesman, Vice, Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, and more. Meghan completed a Masters degree in the department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012 and is now exiled in Mexico with her very photogenic dog.