Who can give birth? It’s a query that most people in most places could answer quite easily for the vast majority of human civilization: women. But that parochial assumption has been called into question in recent years. In place of antiquated terms such as “woman” and “mother,” progressives have opted for gender-neutral neologisms such as “menstruating person” and “birthing people.” Washington Post columnists declared that “it’s time to ‘unsex’ pregnancy.” The Biden administration’s 2021 budget proposal replaced the term “mother” with “birthing person.” The Department of Health and Human Services circulated memos instructing employees to “use gender-neutral salutations and forms of address only” and to “avoid using masculine or feminine pronouns (he, she) to refer to individuals whose gender or preferred pronouns are unknown.” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, when asked during her confirmation hearings to define “woman,” refused, saying, “I’m not a biologist.”
Today, however, something magical and unexpected has happened. Democratic politicians and progressive tastemakers alike seem to have rediscovered what Medieval peasants understood a millennium ago: Women exist. And not just that — women give birth. This miraculous reversal has happened against the backdrop of Roe v. Wade’s potentially imminent demise. At the very moment when American voters may once again have a say in the nation’s abortion laws, the “war on women” is back as though it had never left.
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