“Anyone who gets pregnant” serves not too inelegantly. Or, as a variation, “when someone becomes pregnant, what to do about it should ultimately be their free, uncompelled choice.”
My specific concern about the use of 'pregnant' this way is one that Georgio Agamben might share, that we have moved the issue away from the material/life conditions into the realm of medicalization. In other words, pregnancy becomes a medical condition, and the debate is about treatment options for people who experience this condition.
But, frankly, saying 'women have lost control over their body/fertility by not being able to access medical abortion' is medicalising pregnancy already, isn't it? It's actually downright medicalising being female, come to think.
Not saying that's I'm against abortion, I'm not, but I've never liked this phrasing. It really smacks of a horror of the female body, where only father state and uncle doctor can protect us from ourselves.
Edit: And you're not using this phrasing, so I guess I'm talking about the general usage of this phrase which I see everywhere.
From a political standpoint: conservatives in the US have been planning for this for decades and they executed their plan. I think a lot of people chose to believe they wouldn’t actually follow through. Anyone who is surprised at this just hasn’t paid attention.
Democrats gave them a big assist. Clinton squandered his presidency. Obama declined to make passing federal legislation a priority. Ginsburg refused to retire when she could be replaced by someone similar politically. Their electoral strategy is broadly a failure, putting all of their eggs in the basket of the presidency and Supreme Court while losing at the state and local levels.
There was also a middle path on abortion they’ve long ignored or only offered token support: address the material conditions in the United States so that there are less abortions. Actual healthcare reform, universal programs to support people and children, etc. Abortions should be safe, legal, and private choices but no one should have to choose that route because of economic insecurity.
I think a lot of wokeness is occurring among the class of people who don’t experience actual economic insecurity or are even engaged with the material world. It’s jockeying for upper middle class administrative positions, for lucrative consulting contracts, and the like. I’m not sure this ruling will really impact them precisely for that reason: abortions will still be available in the richer, blue states they live in. It still won’t impact them materially. Many will make out really well, starting non profits off of this, fund raising for PACs, etc.
Add to this that the left in the US largely refused to work to elect HRC after she won the 2016 primaries, 16 million votes to 13 million. They stayed home, or cast a meaningless third-party vote.
The consequences were clear then. The left didn't care.
Nothing happening now is remotely surprising to anyone who was paying attention in 2016.
There is another popular explanation which I find meaningful. The Dems have repeatedly used abortion protections (and universal health care and increased minimum wages) as a carrot to convince people to vote for them, while using the Republicans as a stick ('if they win they'll hurt you...").
It's been such an effective manipulation for so long that they've realised it's best never to actually deliver on those promises.
Clinton's failed presidency can be seen as a reaction against that, the working class suddenly realising it's all been empty promises and threats. I definitely didn't vote for her (I was one of those 'meaningless third-party' voters) because I was pretty sickened by the whole game. I was most definitely not alone.
i absolutely agree that changing the material conditions of the poor would result in a situation where fewer abortions are actually sought, and both parties have constantly dismantled programs targeted at those material conditions.
Only women can become pregnant. This is basic biology.
I use the word "women" to mean what it has meant for the past few thousand years.
No amount of druges and/or surgery can "transition" a male mammal into a female mammal. Sex in mammals is encoded at the cellular level. It cannot be changed.
It might be basic biology but it's not advanced or sophisticated biology. There are more than two possible configurations for the gonads, for the external genitalia, for the "sex chromosomes," & for hormone levels. And while those things have strong statistical correlations, they are not absolutely linked. Even ignoring identity & psychology, humans cannot be sorted into two neat boxes labelled "male" & "female." It may very well turn out that there are physiological correlates with non-binary identities. There's so much about human biology & psychology that we simply don't know.
Also, the English word "women" didn't exist a few thousand years ago—& neither did the English language. Perhaps that's pedantic to point out, but I do think it's important to realize that language is deeply interdependent with culture & history. There are a number of cultures that have more than two sex/gender categories, & it is a mistake to assume that all words that might be reasonably translated as "women" in most contexts have exactly & precisely the same connotation & denotation that the English word "women" has.
I think you're dramatically oversimplifying an issue that is enormously complex at the cultural, biological, sociological, psychological, & even spiritual levels.
I am not drastically oversimplifying, you are drastically overcomplicating. Whether a human is male or female is chemically unambiguous in all but 0.02% of humans. And the vast majority of self-identified "trans" people are not in that 0.02%. They are fully biologically male or female.
Assuming that statistic is true, the question then is whether or not all of the richness of human sex & gender experience can be reduced to chemistry. I seriously doubt that. It's an assumption that has never been demonstrated (& it's not even clear that it could ever, even in principle, be demonstrated). It's an assumption founded on a mechanistic conception of human life, a view that arose no more than four centuries ago as an extension of Protestant theology, which itself is the product of very specific historical conditions & socio-cultural forces.
The experience of gender is very deeply rooted in our experience of self, & I think it's insulting to the human spirit to imagine that someone could be authoritatively told who & what they are on the basis of a chemical analysis.
All that is fine. But when it comes to segregating the sexes, this should be done either by biology or not at all.
Today I was doing a crossword puzzle where the clue involved a sports record of 4:12. The answer was "one mile". I was confused, because the "four minute mile" had been famously first done by Roger Bannister in 1954! Turns out 4:12 is the current WOMENS record. Mens is 3:43.
Men are faster, stronger; in all events, at all distances.
Allowing this guy to compete as a woman is simply absurd. Of course he won the national womens championship:
I'm against it. I'm against allowing men who claim to be "trans" into womens' shelters and prisons. I think it's a horrible policy that will have disasterous consequences, like this:
It feels like you keep changing the conversation here. This thread was not about segregating the sexes...
Part of the complexity in the question of defining sex & gender is that there are variety of contexts in which those definitions are made. It's not obvious to me that the question about what's fair in sports is really related to the question of whether or not only women can become pregnant. Again, I think you're oversimplifying a complicated set of issues.
Regarding the question of physical advantage in sports, it seems to me entirely possible that the segregation could be made on the basis of the specific physiological factors that actually convey the advantage in the sport in question. Sports like boxing & weightlifting already recognize that mere division by sex is not enough & that athletes also need to be segregated by weight. Honestly, I don't care at all about sports, so it's not something I'm ever going to spend much time thinking about. But I'm sure that solutions could be worked out if everyone were to approach the issue with a clear sense that the goal is to allow as many athletes as possible to compete in a way that feels fair & comfortable & if we remain open to questioning our basic assumptions. We might just learn that segregating athletes by sex was never really a great way of doing it in the first place.
Regarding your last point, rape & other forms of violence are endemic in American prisons—both men's & women's—& have been for a very long time. It is a deep-seated problem that has really nothing to do with sex & gender identity, but everything to do with the way American prisons are structured & run & the brutal & violent culture that breeds in environments of degradation, humiliation, hopelessness, & oppression. Removing all the trans-women from women's prisons is not going to stop female inmates from being raped.
That article is disgustingly sensationalist. The NY Post doesn't report on every case of prison rape—they picked this specific case because it supports a narrative they're invested in promoting. I find that extremely disrespectful to the woman who was actually harmed in this incident. They've tried to turn her suffering into a weapon to deploy in cultural warfare.
Women in the US no longer have anywhere to turn politically. The right wants to obliterate their right to control their bodies, the left wants to obliterate their right to single-sex spaces, shelters, and events (eg sports).
The Democrats' odious Equality Act would allow any man to declare hinself to be a woman, for any length of time, long or short, and then enter any women-only space or event.
For example, compete for prize money in professional tennis. Sue the WNBA for illegal gender discrimination for not putting him on a professional womens' basketball team.
A rape by such a man has already occured in a prison in New York, where (like California) this is already state law.
The patriarchy has won, big time. It now completely controls both the left and the right in the US.
I feel a little conflicted about this, to be honest. On the one hand, I don't find "pregnant people" at all awkward or ridiculous, & I recognize that, as a cis man, I'm probably not the best person to be arbitrating the language of sex & gender. But, on the other hand, my understanding of the history of abortion rights is that the contemporary, so-called "pro-life" movement is little more than an aggressive move against women's liberation movements. That is, it's not really about whether or not fetuses are human persons or the morality of terminating pregnancies, but about controlling women by restricting their ability to control their bodies & their fertility. So, while I have no problem at all with the idea that there are pregnant people who are not women, I do think that it is, in essence, a feminist issue, & it would seem rather unfortunate if the concern with linguistic inclusivity came to obscure that.
The trans movement is the revenge of the patriarchy: men who claim to be women are allowed into every womens space, every womens event. As I said above, the partiarchy has taken over both the right and the left, and subjugates women one way or another.
Yeah, I think that's a crucial point you are making. Abortion rights were specifically part of the movement towards women's liberation, since being unable to prevent a pregnancy (through contraceptives) and to terminate it (through abortion) were restrictions on women's abilities to determine their own material conditions. Moving it away from women towards 'pregnant people' changes the entire narrative and pulls it out of that historical/material struggle.
From what I have read of some early history, there was a deliberate steering by top management/ inserted activists into the women's liberation movement towards abortion-centric ideology and the kind of Cosmo girl agenda and away from quality of life issues for women and mothers everywhere.
The hypocrisy of the establishment Left on this issue is staggering. For over a year they have been coercing people to receive untested injections, yet they now suddenly remember the principle of 'My Body, My Choice'.
I think the blame can be placed all over and some have already commented on some of those points. The one I see, and I agree with was predicted by Camile Paglia in the 90’s was during her college speaking tours she would do regarding abortion and other culture topics. Paglia, who believes in abortion on demand and certainly qualifies as pro-choice, argued that if you are pro-choice and you remove or do not grapple with and acknowledge the moral implications of abortion that the pro-life argument ultimately wins out. In other words, to ignore it or try and explain it away as just superstitious foolishness would ultimately lead to where we are now. There was a reason Safe, legal and rare took the wind out of many of the pro-life hardline views and political gains for a few years. That political phrase acknowledged the moral framework at some level and most people I know, and polls back this up, do not believe in abortion with zero limitations.
Some key examples I have seen this manifest is with the ‘shout your abortion’ campaign and calling pro-life people or pro-choice people being accused of being ‘anti-women’ because they didn’t fully agree with private matters proudly being put on social media. It was not just the fellow Christians in my life that were horrified, it was many of the secular liberals (their label, not mine) were horrified in similar ways. One person is my wife. Her cousin works in Planned Parenthood in Washington, D.C. and this cousin and others in her family have been on the front lines of women’s rights legislation and other matters. The shout your abortion thing came up and my wife simply stated that probably isn’t the best way to argue for the women’s right to an abortion. What happened next was what we are all witnessing now in the West. My wife was deemed essentially a heretic and called “anti-women”. It was a rather crazy experience, and it did not and still does not matter my wife is very pro-choice. It was not a conversation and any mention of the moral implications made it worse with the one cousin stating: “Its not a person, it not anything, get rid of that shit.”
Back to Paglia’s’ point. If that is how the argument is framed, its no wonder the restrictions at hand win out. The irony missed is they seem the most rational even if draconian. Which leads to your question Rhyd, woke ideology is wholly unprepared to handle the abortion debate because it doesn't see the moral argument framework, only the structures of oppression framework. It's Paglia's point from another view.
Moving beyond identity- allowing bodies ... pregnancy is not a condition, but a physiological experience, should be trusted to those who experience it- regardless of how they see themselves. And i suppose, with some deeper consideration, that's what it comes to. It's upsetting to me that it's a left/ right issue. Those who are able to bear children need the proper tools to be able to work with or against that power, if nothing more than being knowledgeable about their own bodies, and being tuned into when in their cycle they have the potential to conceive, and having a respectful partner who honors the desires of that time... A troubling element of parts of trans culture for me- the degree of basis in hate and/ or discomfort and disconnect for our amazing bodies- that many have become so estranged from that they want nothing to do with the body they've been given. Regardless it is an issue that should be no business or campaign of government. And what "medical rights" for "those with uteruses " (sounds so anatomical, but that's the point, right?) might look like in this generation's tackling of the matter may take on some odd language- I'd be one to argue that "we've" never succeeded in these "rights" beyond levels of knowledge that have been forced primarily underground, which is very unfortunate indeed. The right, the power, is in knowledge that can not be taken. it is about the body, and always has been. The identity of the body in this case is trivial.
Poignant points you make! Thanks for these. I'm wondering why anyone gets pulled into watching another car crash when we all know we could use herbs, plants or even pharmaceuticals to terminate a pregnancy. We don't need their laws and as you mention, it can be fought for on local ground, if people care to do so. Seems like they just want to keep us in a state of outrage. Personally, I've moved on from relying on the government to align itself with my values, I'm just going to get back to living them. Wish others would come out and play already. It's gonna take a village to remake the culture.
“Anyone who gets pregnant” serves not too inelegantly. Or, as a variation, “when someone becomes pregnant, what to do about it should ultimately be their free, uncompelled choice.”
Yeah, good luck with that.
The unconditional endoresement of trans ideology by the left is a big driver of the political resurgence of the right.
My specific concern about the use of 'pregnant' this way is one that Georgio Agamben might share, that we have moved the issue away from the material/life conditions into the realm of medicalization. In other words, pregnancy becomes a medical condition, and the debate is about treatment options for people who experience this condition.
But, frankly, saying 'women have lost control over their body/fertility by not being able to access medical abortion' is medicalising pregnancy already, isn't it? It's actually downright medicalising being female, come to think.
Not saying that's I'm against abortion, I'm not, but I've never liked this phrasing. It really smacks of a horror of the female body, where only father state and uncle doctor can protect us from ourselves.
Edit: And you're not using this phrasing, so I guess I'm talking about the general usage of this phrase which I see everywhere.
From a political standpoint: conservatives in the US have been planning for this for decades and they executed their plan. I think a lot of people chose to believe they wouldn’t actually follow through. Anyone who is surprised at this just hasn’t paid attention.
Democrats gave them a big assist. Clinton squandered his presidency. Obama declined to make passing federal legislation a priority. Ginsburg refused to retire when she could be replaced by someone similar politically. Their electoral strategy is broadly a failure, putting all of their eggs in the basket of the presidency and Supreme Court while losing at the state and local levels.
There was also a middle path on abortion they’ve long ignored or only offered token support: address the material conditions in the United States so that there are less abortions. Actual healthcare reform, universal programs to support people and children, etc. Abortions should be safe, legal, and private choices but no one should have to choose that route because of economic insecurity.
I think a lot of wokeness is occurring among the class of people who don’t experience actual economic insecurity or are even engaged with the material world. It’s jockeying for upper middle class administrative positions, for lucrative consulting contracts, and the like. I’m not sure this ruling will really impact them precisely for that reason: abortions will still be available in the richer, blue states they live in. It still won’t impact them materially. Many will make out really well, starting non profits off of this, fund raising for PACs, etc.
Add to this that the left in the US largely refused to work to elect HRC after she won the 2016 primaries, 16 million votes to 13 million. They stayed home, or cast a meaningless third-party vote.
The consequences were clear then. The left didn't care.
Nothing happening now is remotely surprising to anyone who was paying attention in 2016.
There is another popular explanation which I find meaningful. The Dems have repeatedly used abortion protections (and universal health care and increased minimum wages) as a carrot to convince people to vote for them, while using the Republicans as a stick ('if they win they'll hurt you...").
It's been such an effective manipulation for so long that they've realised it's best never to actually deliver on those promises.
Clinton's failed presidency can be seen as a reaction against that, the working class suddenly realising it's all been empty promises and threats. I definitely didn't vote for her (I was one of those 'meaningless third-party' voters) because I was pretty sickened by the whole game. I was most definitely not alone.
i absolutely agree that changing the material conditions of the poor would result in a situation where fewer abortions are actually sought, and both parties have constantly dismantled programs targeted at those material conditions.
Pregnant people seems fine to me.
Only women can become pregnant. This is basic biology.
I use the word "women" to mean what it has meant for the past few thousand years.
No amount of druges and/or surgery can "transition" a male mammal into a female mammal. Sex in mammals is encoded at the cellular level. It cannot be changed.
It might be basic biology but it's not advanced or sophisticated biology. There are more than two possible configurations for the gonads, for the external genitalia, for the "sex chromosomes," & for hormone levels. And while those things have strong statistical correlations, they are not absolutely linked. Even ignoring identity & psychology, humans cannot be sorted into two neat boxes labelled "male" & "female." It may very well turn out that there are physiological correlates with non-binary identities. There's so much about human biology & psychology that we simply don't know.
Also, the English word "women" didn't exist a few thousand years ago—& neither did the English language. Perhaps that's pedantic to point out, but I do think it's important to realize that language is deeply interdependent with culture & history. There are a number of cultures that have more than two sex/gender categories, & it is a mistake to assume that all words that might be reasonably translated as "women" in most contexts have exactly & precisely the same connotation & denotation that the English word "women" has.
I think you're dramatically oversimplifying an issue that is enormously complex at the cultural, biological, sociological, psychological, & even spiritual levels.
I am not drastically oversimplifying, you are drastically overcomplicating. Whether a human is male or female is chemically unambiguous in all but 0.02% of humans. And the vast majority of self-identified "trans" people are not in that 0.02%. They are fully biologically male or female.
Assuming that statistic is true, the question then is whether or not all of the richness of human sex & gender experience can be reduced to chemistry. I seriously doubt that. It's an assumption that has never been demonstrated (& it's not even clear that it could ever, even in principle, be demonstrated). It's an assumption founded on a mechanistic conception of human life, a view that arose no more than four centuries ago as an extension of Protestant theology, which itself is the product of very specific historical conditions & socio-cultural forces.
The experience of gender is very deeply rooted in our experience of self, & I think it's insulting to the human spirit to imagine that someone could be authoritatively told who & what they are on the basis of a chemical analysis.
All that is fine. But when it comes to segregating the sexes, this should be done either by biology or not at all.
Today I was doing a crossword puzzle where the clue involved a sports record of 4:12. The answer was "one mile". I was confused, because the "four minute mile" had been famously first done by Roger Bannister in 1954! Turns out 4:12 is the current WOMENS record. Mens is 3:43.
Men are faster, stronger; in all events, at all distances.
Allowing this guy to compete as a woman is simply absurd. Of course he won the national womens championship:
https://pennathletics.com/sports/mens-swimming-and-diving/roster/will-thomas/14590
I'm against it. I'm against allowing men who claim to be "trans" into womens' shelters and prisons. I think it's a horrible policy that will have disasterous consequences, like this:
https://nypost.com/2022/04/26/how-bowing-to-the-trans-lobby-led-to-a-rikers-prison-rape/
It feels like you keep changing the conversation here. This thread was not about segregating the sexes...
Part of the complexity in the question of defining sex & gender is that there are variety of contexts in which those definitions are made. It's not obvious to me that the question about what's fair in sports is really related to the question of whether or not only women can become pregnant. Again, I think you're oversimplifying a complicated set of issues.
Regarding the question of physical advantage in sports, it seems to me entirely possible that the segregation could be made on the basis of the specific physiological factors that actually convey the advantage in the sport in question. Sports like boxing & weightlifting already recognize that mere division by sex is not enough & that athletes also need to be segregated by weight. Honestly, I don't care at all about sports, so it's not something I'm ever going to spend much time thinking about. But I'm sure that solutions could be worked out if everyone were to approach the issue with a clear sense that the goal is to allow as many athletes as possible to compete in a way that feels fair & comfortable & if we remain open to questioning our basic assumptions. We might just learn that segregating athletes by sex was never really a great way of doing it in the first place.
Regarding your last point, rape & other forms of violence are endemic in American prisons—both men's & women's—& have been for a very long time. It is a deep-seated problem that has really nothing to do with sex & gender identity, but everything to do with the way American prisons are structured & run & the brutal & violent culture that breeds in environments of degradation, humiliation, hopelessness, & oppression. Removing all the trans-women from women's prisons is not going to stop female inmates from being raped.
That article is disgustingly sensationalist. The NY Post doesn't report on every case of prison rape—they picked this specific case because it supports a narrative they're invested in promoting. I find that extremely disrespectful to the woman who was actually harmed in this incident. They've tried to turn her suffering into a weapon to deploy in cultural warfare.
Nuts.
I think that phrase will probably be what many settle on.
Women in the US no longer have anywhere to turn politically. The right wants to obliterate their right to control their bodies, the left wants to obliterate their right to single-sex spaces, shelters, and events (eg sports).
The Democrats' odious Equality Act would allow any man to declare hinself to be a woman, for any length of time, long or short, and then enter any women-only space or event.
For example, compete for prize money in professional tennis. Sue the WNBA for illegal gender discrimination for not putting him on a professional womens' basketball team.
A rape by such a man has already occured in a prison in New York, where (like California) this is already state law.
The patriarchy has won, big time. It now completely controls both the left and the right in the US.
I feel a little conflicted about this, to be honest. On the one hand, I don't find "pregnant people" at all awkward or ridiculous, & I recognize that, as a cis man, I'm probably not the best person to be arbitrating the language of sex & gender. But, on the other hand, my understanding of the history of abortion rights is that the contemporary, so-called "pro-life" movement is little more than an aggressive move against women's liberation movements. That is, it's not really about whether or not fetuses are human persons or the morality of terminating pregnancies, but about controlling women by restricting their ability to control their bodies & their fertility. So, while I have no problem at all with the idea that there are pregnant people who are not women, I do think that it is, in essence, a feminist issue, & it would seem rather unfortunate if the concern with linguistic inclusivity came to obscure that.
The trans movement is the revenge of the patriarchy: men who claim to be women are allowed into every womens space, every womens event. As I said above, the partiarchy has taken over both the right and the left, and subjugates women one way or another.
Yeah, I think that's a crucial point you are making. Abortion rights were specifically part of the movement towards women's liberation, since being unable to prevent a pregnancy (through contraceptives) and to terminate it (through abortion) were restrictions on women's abilities to determine their own material conditions. Moving it away from women towards 'pregnant people' changes the entire narrative and pulls it out of that historical/material struggle.
From what I have read of some early history, there was a deliberate steering by top management/ inserted activists into the women's liberation movement towards abortion-centric ideology and the kind of Cosmo girl agenda and away from quality of life issues for women and mothers everywhere.
The hypocrisy of the establishment Left on this issue is staggering. For over a year they have been coercing people to receive untested injections, yet they now suddenly remember the principle of 'My Body, My Choice'.
Yeah, there's that.
I think the blame can be placed all over and some have already commented on some of those points. The one I see, and I agree with was predicted by Camile Paglia in the 90’s was during her college speaking tours she would do regarding abortion and other culture topics. Paglia, who believes in abortion on demand and certainly qualifies as pro-choice, argued that if you are pro-choice and you remove or do not grapple with and acknowledge the moral implications of abortion that the pro-life argument ultimately wins out. In other words, to ignore it or try and explain it away as just superstitious foolishness would ultimately lead to where we are now. There was a reason Safe, legal and rare took the wind out of many of the pro-life hardline views and political gains for a few years. That political phrase acknowledged the moral framework at some level and most people I know, and polls back this up, do not believe in abortion with zero limitations.
Some key examples I have seen this manifest is with the ‘shout your abortion’ campaign and calling pro-life people or pro-choice people being accused of being ‘anti-women’ because they didn’t fully agree with private matters proudly being put on social media. It was not just the fellow Christians in my life that were horrified, it was many of the secular liberals (their label, not mine) were horrified in similar ways. One person is my wife. Her cousin works in Planned Parenthood in Washington, D.C. and this cousin and others in her family have been on the front lines of women’s rights legislation and other matters. The shout your abortion thing came up and my wife simply stated that probably isn’t the best way to argue for the women’s right to an abortion. What happened next was what we are all witnessing now in the West. My wife was deemed essentially a heretic and called “anti-women”. It was a rather crazy experience, and it did not and still does not matter my wife is very pro-choice. It was not a conversation and any mention of the moral implications made it worse with the one cousin stating: “Its not a person, it not anything, get rid of that shit.”
Back to Paglia’s’ point. If that is how the argument is framed, its no wonder the restrictions at hand win out. The irony missed is they seem the most rational even if draconian. Which leads to your question Rhyd, woke ideology is wholly unprepared to handle the abortion debate because it doesn't see the moral argument framework, only the structures of oppression framework. It's Paglia's point from another view.
Moving beyond identity- allowing bodies ... pregnancy is not a condition, but a physiological experience, should be trusted to those who experience it- regardless of how they see themselves. And i suppose, with some deeper consideration, that's what it comes to. It's upsetting to me that it's a left/ right issue. Those who are able to bear children need the proper tools to be able to work with or against that power, if nothing more than being knowledgeable about their own bodies, and being tuned into when in their cycle they have the potential to conceive, and having a respectful partner who honors the desires of that time... A troubling element of parts of trans culture for me- the degree of basis in hate and/ or discomfort and disconnect for our amazing bodies- that many have become so estranged from that they want nothing to do with the body they've been given. Regardless it is an issue that should be no business or campaign of government. And what "medical rights" for "those with uteruses " (sounds so anatomical, but that's the point, right?) might look like in this generation's tackling of the matter may take on some odd language- I'd be one to argue that "we've" never succeeded in these "rights" beyond levels of knowledge that have been forced primarily underground, which is very unfortunate indeed. The right, the power, is in knowledge that can not be taken. it is about the body, and always has been. The identity of the body in this case is trivial.
Poignant points you make! Thanks for these. I'm wondering why anyone gets pulled into watching another car crash when we all know we could use herbs, plants or even pharmaceuticals to terminate a pregnancy. We don't need their laws and as you mention, it can be fought for on local ground, if people care to do so. Seems like they just want to keep us in a state of outrage. Personally, I've moved on from relying on the government to align itself with my values, I'm just going to get back to living them. Wish others would come out and play already. It's gonna take a village to remake the culture.