Abortion activists who have been referring to mothers as “birthing people,” to women as “people who menstruate,” and to biological males who identify as transgender as “women” suddenly appeared to know what women actually are when laws opposing abortion went into effect in Texas.
Women’s rights activist Kara Dansky pointed this out on Twitter, and it’s rather stunning to see. She noted that famed author J.K. Rowling was “right” when she commented, “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
For this tweet, and others that identified women as “adult human females,” Rowling was roundly renounced, even by the movie stars that owe their success to her imagination. Dansky, who has blasted the Equality Act, which equates biological sex to gender identity, provided a list of articles that have not even a little confusion about what a woman is in the context of abortion.
The Left’s Definition of ‘Woman’ Appears Clear Now
An article from NPR’s Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg titled “Texas Law That Bans Abortion Before Many Women Know They’re Pregnant Takes Effect” makes clear that “women” are the ones who need more time to “know they’re pregnant.”
Yet NPR has had trouble in the past with the concept that there are scientific differences between males and females that affect sports. Of bills banning male athletes from participating in women’s sports, NPR said: “The often heated debates around these bills have centered on whether transgender women and girls have an unfair advantage over cisgender women — a term used for those who identify with the sex assigned to them at birth.” The article says “sex” is “assigned at birth,” not an innate biological reality.
The New York Times noted that fetal heartbeat “activity starts at around six weeks, before many women are even aware that they are pregnant.” The Times appears here to know that women are the ones who get pregnant, and that the word for persons who can get pregnant is “women.”
Yet in 2019 the Times wrote that “The current debates over trans women bring us back to the question of what set of core experiences supposedly make someone who was assigned female at birth a ‘real’ woman. Is it menstruation or childbirth? Nope — lots of women don’t experience those, either by fate or by choice.” But apparently, in the face of the removal of legal abortion, “women” means “person who gets pregnant and often doesn’t know until past six weeks.”
NBC News quoted Planned Parenthood CEO Alex McGill Johnson, saying “Without relief, starting tomorrow, 7 million Texas women of reproductive age will lose access to abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.”
Johnson wrote in The New York Times in April that “By privileging whiteness, we’ve contributed to America harming Black women and other women of color. And when we focus too narrowly on ‘women’s health,’ we have excluded trans and nonbinary people.” Isn’t Johnson excluding those same people when she says that only Texas “women” “will lose access to abortion”?
The Washington Post also blasted the new Texas law, saying that it “effectively eliminates the guarantee in Roe v. Wade and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that women have a right to end their pregnancies before viability, and that states may not impose undue burdens on that decision.”
However, in June, the Post opined that “contemporary anti-trans messaging is still based on the same underlying assumptions that employers long used to justify firing transgender workers: that trans people are threatening and that trans women aren’t women. These assumptions have always been unfounded, harmful and false.”
Yet the Post’s article on the Texas law doesn’t mention the concern that either trans men or trans women won’t have access to pregnancy-ending procedures. Perhaps the Post understands that all people who could have an unwanted pregnancy fit under one word. Perhaps that word is “woman.”
Dansky points out that the American Civil Liberties Union, which has said repeatedly it’s a “myth” that “sex is binary,” identified those who are at risk of not legally being able to have abortions as “women.” In its filing with the Supreme Court, however, the ACLU did not mention their concerns that transgender people have abortion access. They were only concerned with access for “women.”
The ACLU appears to know what “women” are in the context of abortion law. In its petition to the Supreme Court for an emergency injunction on the Texas law, the ACLU wrote that the law “violated nearly fifty years of this Court’s precedent and it has refused to expedite consideration of the pending appeal—leaving the rights of Texas women…”
In posting their concerns about the law, the ACLU wrote that “The impact of SB8 will be especially hard on Black women, who disproportionately suffer from the severe maternal mortality crisis in Texas and are 3x more likely than white women to die during pregnancy or shortly after childbirth.”
It is undoubtedly true that the ACLU, left-leaning media outlets, and activists are clear on what the word “woman” means, and that its definition is “adult human female.” It is likely that these groups and journalists know that women are the only people who can get pregnant, and that anyone who can get pregnant is a woman. The fight to stop restrictions on abortion prove that there is no question what the fundamental characteristics of females are, and that any ink spilled to the contrary is simply rhetorical.
When it suits the left’s interests, men and women don’t exist, biology is a myth, and transgender persons are whatever they say they are, but for an abortion, everyone knows what a woman is.
Source: The Federalist
