Mick Hartley

Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:

Remember the time the ACLU rewrote an old Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote? It was in September 2021, on the first anniversary of RBG’s death. The ACLU rightly wanted to celebrate the esteemed justice who did so much for the liberation of women in the United States. So it took to Twitter to remind people of what RBG said about one of the testiest moral topics in that nation: abortion. ‘The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] wellbeing and dignity’, the ACLU had Ginsburg saying. ‘When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices’, the quote continued. Most people’s reaction upon seeing that tweet was probably the same as mine – not ‘Great comment, RBG’ but ‘What’s with all the square brackets?’.

Ginsburg, of course, did not say what the ACLU said she said. She didn’t say ‘person’ or ‘people’ or ‘they’ or ‘their’. She said woman, she, her. Here it is, unmangled, un-Ministry of Truthed: ‘The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her wellbeing and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.’ RBG’s commentary on abortion, from 1993, contained another line too, arguably its most important. ‘If you impose restraints that impede her choice’, Ginsburg said, ‘you are disadvantaging her because of her sex’ (my italics). Notably, the ACLU opted not to include that line in its airbrushed, politically corrected version of Ginsburg’s views on abortion. Well, if it is reluctant to say the word ‘woman’, it is hardly going to say ‘sex’, is it? …

Most disturbing of all was the ACLU’s erasure of sex. Not only did it fail to include Ginsburg’s observation that restrictions on abortion rights represent a denigration of women on the basis of their sex, it flat-out refused to use any sexed term at all, including the w-word. The ACLU, like so many others these days, seemed to be taking flight from reality, from biology, from the materiality of sex and womanhood and the question of what distinguishes women’s bodies from men’s and why this distinction might necessitate women having specific rights. To blot out the material truth of sex on any issue is pretty strange – to do it in relation to abortion is surreal, if not sinister, given abortion is so clearly a matter of bodies, reproduction, sex.

The ACLU / RBG incident points to a very serious problem in 21st-century public life: how the tyranny of gender has usurped the reality and the language of womanhood. How the transgender ideology, and the uncritical embrace of it by so many political and cultural institutions, has led to the shunting aside of older ideas of sex-based rights. How the post-scientific, relativistic notion of sex as something we can choose – so that a man can become a woman simply by declaring himself to be a woman – has obscured the distinctions between the sexes and our ability to talk about why these distinctions are sometimes important. When even one of the world’s most noted institutional defenders of the liberty to speak cannot bring itself to say the word woman in relation to abortion, you know the gender cult has gone too far. Now, following the revelation that the Supreme Court is considering overturning Roe v Wade, it is a matter of urgency that we temper this tyranny of gender and rediscover the importance of sex, truth and freedom of choice.

[The ACLU, guided by transman Chase Strangio, has long since given up on its core principles and become yet another pusher of trans ideology.]

Even Ms. magazine today publishes articles with headlines like ‘Abortion is not just for cis women’. That piece complains about the fact that ‘cisgender women’ – ie, women – are too often ‘the focus of conversations around abortion’. This ignores ‘transgender and non-binary people’, apparently. ‘We are the ones being alienated’, the Ms. writer says. This is Ms. we are talking about. Arguably the most famous feminist magazine in the world. Founded by Gloria Steinhem. The first issue of which, published in 1972, pre-Roe v Wade, featured a controversial two-page spread headlined ‘We have had abortions’, in which 53 prominent American women, including Billie Jean King, Nora Ephron and Susan Sontag, admitted to having had a pregnancy terminated. This is the magazine which now says the abortion sector’s focus on ‘women’ is a form of ‘discrimination’ (my emphasis). Can you imagine if that ‘We have had abortions’ feature was published today? There would be fury on Twitter. ‘Where are the men?’, outraged activists would demand to know.

So we have the ACLU, Women’s Health and Ms. wondering out loud why ‘women’ are prioritised in the discussion and provision of abortion. We have leading politicians and justices who cannot or will not say what a woman is. We have the British Medical Journal asking, ‘Do we need the word “woman” in healthcare?’. We have actual abortion providers welcoming ‘people of all genders’ to avail of their services. And we have the proliferation of terms like ‘pregnant person’, ‘chest-feeding’, ‘human milk’ and ‘perinatal ward’ because apparently ‘pregnant woman’, ‘breastfeeding’, ‘breastmilk’ and ‘maternity ward’ are deeply offensive terms that might make some people feel invalidated, and possibly dehumanised.

This is the context in which the threatened overturning of Roe v Wade is taking place. Anyone who says this context doesn’t matter, that all we are witnessing is a finessing and improvement of language to make it more inclusive, is lying to themselves. The context in which the Roe v Wade judgement was made in 1973 was one in which the women’s liberation movement was making waves. Placards demanded women’s rights and women’s power to choose. Women’s organisations demanded the right of women to work, to stand for office, to enjoy equal treatment. Activists demanded improved women’s health, to facilitate women’s liberty. In stark contrast, the context in which Roe v Wade now quakes under that first-draft judgement of the Supreme Court is one in which you can be called a bigot just for saying ‘women’s health’. In which talking about women and their sex-based rights has been rebranded as a species of bigotry. In which any woman who insists that women are real and therefore deserve their own sex-based rights and spaces risks being called a bitch, a TERF or a whore and being cancelled from polite society. In which even Ruth Bader Ginsburg can be posthumously censured for the speechcrime of uttering the words woman, she and her.