By now, most of us have heard the jokes and seen the memes regarding Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “I’m not a biologist” comment at last week’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In case you missed it, when asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn to define a woman, Jackson said she didn’t know, adding, “I’m not a biologist.”
A number of progressive outlets have come to Jackson’s defense. Many, including The New York Times, asserted that Blackburn’s question was an attack against transgender individuals. Others, like The Washington Post, claimed Blackburn made a “bad faith” attack, as there is no simple answer to this question.
There was an alarming undercurrent to some of these arguments: That, to truly be a woman, one must support abortion.
One of the most outrageous defenses of Jackson’s “I’m not a biologist” statement came from USA Today. The opinion piece by Alia Dastiger claimed, “Scientists agree there is no sufficient way to clearly define what makes someone a woman, and with billions of women on the planet, there is much variation.”
Buried in the nonsense, though, was this comment from Rebecca Jordan-Young, a gender studies scholar at Barnard College: “When Blackburn and the rest of her caucus support women’s full reproductive justice…then maybe it will make sense to engage their questions about who can count as a woman.”
So, according to Jordan-Young, women can’t engage in conversations about women or, perhaps, even be a woman, unless they support abortion.
Additionally, columnist Monica Hesse stated in her article for The Washington Post, “…[T]he act of being a woman often has less to do with biology than it has to do with…The laws that are permitted to regulate the most intimate parts of your body.”
A majority of abortion advocates have claimed for years that it is impossible for one to be both a feminist and pro-life, despite the existence of groups such as Feminists for Life and New Wave Feminists. Now, women can’t even be feminists unless they support the “right” to kill their own preborn children. What is most alarming, though, is this marginalization of women does not stop with just pro-life women.
Transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who has dominated NCAA women’s swimming competitions since transitioning from male to female, is currently the most noteworthy example of this cancellation of women. It’s no surprise that Thomas has dominated the world of women’s swimming, as she is actually a “he”. While the transgender issue is not in IRL’s bailiwick, the cancellation of women is.
Why? Abortion politics have led to this marginalization and objectification of women. Lia Thomas exposes just how marginalized and objectified women have become.
A recent Tweet from the popular Twitter feed of Caleb Hearon (@calebsaysthings) illustrates this perfectly. In response to female swimmer Reka Gyorgy’s statement to the NCAA—after being prevented from competing at the 500 freestyle finals at the NCAA championships because of Thomas—Hearon mocked Gyorgy’s appearance and, in essence, told her to be a good girl and to sit down and shut up:
If i placed 17th in an event i was getting free (or reduced) college for i would simply keep things nice and quiet. and maybe those lips wouldn’t be so thin if we ran the mouth a little less.
Not to be outdone, dozens of men (and women) joined the chorus in ridiculing Gyorgy.
But Lia Thomas is not the only example. USA Today (again), named biological male Rachel Levine as one of their women of the year. “Mother,” one of the most cherished titles a woman can hold, has been replaced with such nonsensical terms as “pregnant people” and “birthing person”. In just a few short years, we’ve gone from “Believe all women,” to “A woman? What’s that?”
The reality is that progressive politics – most of all abortion politics – are nothing but misogyny in disguise.
Pro-lifers have known for nearly 50 years that abortion takes the lives of preborn children through an act of incredible violence. We have also known that abortion is incredibly harmful to women, as well, often leading to depression and a lifetime of regret.
When abortion was legalized in 1973, we predicted that it would lead to a slippery slope of growing disregard for human life. What we didn’t predict, though, was that it would lead to the eradication of women, as well.