The ‘Women’s Rights’ Movement Goes Woke

S ince its inception, the legal-abortion movement has centered its argument on a key political narrative: The right to abortion is essential for women’s freedom and flourishing. Legal abortion is a woman’s right, and its restriction is an assault on women.

For decades, this assertion has bolstered their rhetoric. In recent years, though, the argument been considerably muddied by the rising influence of left-wing gender ideologues. According to gender ideology, after all, there’s not really any such thing as a woman — so how could abortion be a matter of women’s rights?

In the world of transgender activism, sex isn’t binary, and one’s gender need not align with his or her biological sex. Instead, there is a spectrum of gender expression, and it is highly fluid. A person could fall on any part of that spectrum at any given moment in time and find himself elsewhere on the spectrum at another.

On this view, the facts of human biology, as they relate to sexuality in particular, are essentially meaningless. A person’s having been born “in a male body” or having been “assigned male” at birth means nothing if he later decides that he was meant to have been born as a female — such a person is considered to be a woman who somehow became trapped in a man’s body. The mind is triumphant; the body is dismissed as either disordered or immaterial.

This worldview has tremendous implications for our understanding of human reproduction, and the movement’s growing political sway has unmoored progressives from biology. Under their framework, decency now requires including natal men who believe themselves to be women in categories previously reserved to biological females, and vice versa.

As they have gained prominence in culture and politics, proponents of gender ideology have rolled out a complex linguistic road map to which we all are expected to conform. In the name of inclusion, they have constructed a paralyzing minefield within which the word “woman,” in particular, is going out of style.

Progressives now insist that companies such as Tampax and Always must replace the word “women” with “people who menstruate” or “menstruators.” The Biden administration has erased “pregnant women” in favor of the almost unbelievable “birthing persons.” The Centers for Disease Control now uses the only slightly less clunky “pregnant people.” In a nod to gender inclusivity, the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine last month encouraged the use of the appalling term “chestfeeding.”

In one recent interview, New York socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alternately used the terms “people who give birth,” “women,” “any menstruating person,” and “people who are not cisgender men” to refer to pregnant women. This is a rhetorical structure so absurd that even its architects have a hard time keeping up.

Where does all of this leave the abortion-rights activist, whose most successful argument has long been that restricting abortion is an assault on women’s reproductive freedom? Doesn’t this spell doom for the progressive movement’s rhetoric of the “war on women”? Somehow, a “pregnant person’s right to choose” and the “war on people who are not cisgender men” don’t have quite the same ring.

Already, we’ve seen the abortion-advocacy movement twist itself in knots struggling to advance its cause while avoiding the approbation of gender ideologues. In response to the Texas Heartbeat Act’s taking effect, Planned Parenthood decried the law with phrases such as “someone will find out they’re pregnant” and “people in Texas seeking an abortion.” The American Civil Liberties Union used the phrases “before many people even know they are pregnant” and “assisting someone who gets an abortion.” Rewire editor Imani Gandy says, “There are pregnant people who have abortions scheduled who now are going to be forced to carry pregnancies to term.” (Emphasis added.)

Legal abortion’s most vociferous defenders have neutered their most politically potent argument, and people who call themselves feminists have eliminated the word “woman” from their vocabulary out of deference to the woke language police. In their desperation to gain political power, progressives have crammed abortion advocates and gender ideologues under one umbrella, and in the process, they’ve robbed themselves of the most effective rhetoric they’ve ever found to justify the violence of abortion.