The left’s narrative has long been a feminist tale of oppression. For fifty years, the abortion movement has revolved around the myth that it safeguards women’s health. For this reason, abortion is expressed in terms of women’s bodies with cries of “my body, my choice.” Men need not opine.
Suddenly, a strange new crack has appeared in the abortion movement that disputes this narrative. Medical organizations, advocacy groups and leftist politicians are changing the rhetoric. They no longer use the word ‘woman’ in the abortion debate. The movement has gone woke and is leaving behind feminists who now represent yesterday’s revolution.
A stab in the back
The New York Times writer Michael Powell quoted a pro-abortion tweet by the American Civil Liberties Union that sounded the alarm about the threat of overturning the Roe decision. The tweet failed to mention the only demographic biologically able to have an abortion. It reads:
“Abortion bans disproportionately harm: Black Indigenous and other people of color. The L.G.B.T.Q. community. Immigrants. Young people. Those working to make ends meet. People with disabilities. Protecting abortion access is an urgent matter of racial and economic justice.”
The message of the tweet is clear. The abortion movement is now so fused with the avant-garde of today’s woke revolution that it cannot be separated from all identity groups. Leftist theory is now so mainstream that the affirmation that a person is a woman cannot be tolerated, as everyone must be forced into a bizarre non-binary world. The supposed cause of the abortion fight – oppressed women—is now left out, which leads to the suspicion that it never was the cause in the first place.
Even Planned Parenthood and N.A.R.A.L. Pro-Choice America, that have long written the script in the abortion debate, are avoiding the w-word. They may hold women’s marches here and there to impress their grassroots. They will still talk about woman’s choice referring to a past talking point. However, behind the backs of the activists, they are betraying feminists. Pro-abortion literature increasingly employs terms like “pregnant people” and “birthing people” to indicate women who are expecting children.
What is a woman?
It’s not about women anymore. The long decades spent developing women’s studies departments and feminist literature are over. They are passé and even reactionary. The new struggle revolves around “gender”-neutral language that reflects the belief that a person’s sex is a social construct and self-determined.
To affirm the existence of a man or woman must be rejected altogether. Indeed, not even Supreme Court Justice-designate Ketanji Brown Jackson would answer the question: What is a woman?” lest she stray off the woke path.
In the case of abortion, there can be no distinctions between women and “transgendered” men since both can become “birthing persons” and have abortions. The new abortion activism reflects this sea change without women.
