Speaking the truth about women

Efforts to reduce maternal mortality typically target risk factors among pregnant women. For example, the Centers for Disease Control runs a prevention program to “ERASE Maternal Mortality.” But now, a bill in Washington, D.C., brings a new tactic to the fight against maternal mortality—erasing “women.”

The bill is President Biden’s vast social spending proposal, originally introduced with a price tag of $3.5 trillion. Among other programs, the legislation would fund projects to prevent maternal mortality. Yet this section of the massive bill goes out of its way to eliminate the word “women.” The text instead refers numerous times to “pregnant, lactating, and postpartum individuals.” The individuals formerly known as women, that is.

Yet, a telltale inconsistency emerges in this maternal mortality section, which repeatedly uses the word “maternal” even as it avoids “women.” What do they think maternal means?

The incoherence continues across the sprawling legislation. The nearly 2,500-page Biden proposal actually uses the word “women” in other policy sections. Consider parts of the proposal like the “Women, Infants, and Children” nutrition program or the “Violence Against Women Act,” or phrases like “women and minority-owned businesses.”

Much more than language is at stake, however. The premise of these programs is that there is something unique about women. What’s more, they implicitly acknowledge that a woman’s distinctiveness can result in circumstances and needs that society should take into account.

The language inconsistencies in the proposed spending bill reflect the ideological incoherence driving the new drafting standards. Disconnecting words from reality denies essential, stable biological differences. This obscures serious issues women uniquely face. The ideology behind it also diminishes women in a way that was supposed to be a thing of the past.

Transgender ideology plays on superficial gender stereotypes. Gender transitioning involves assuming the appearance and demeanor of the opposite sex. That reduces what it means to be a woman to surface-level features. At the same time, transgender theory would erase social recognition of the most profound biological distinction of women: the capacity to conceive and bear children.

You may remember that a similar denial of women’s biological reality was at the center of the recent controversy over an ACLU tweet that actually reworded a statement by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The tweet rewrote an RBG quote to eliminate her use of “woman” and female-specific pronouns.

RBG made the original, unredacted statement about women to the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearings in 1993. In the same hearing, Ginsburg had previously noted “that one thing that conspicuously distinguishes women from men is that only women become pregnant.” Conservatives and liberals once agreed on that much.

Justice Ginsburg’s common sense insight about the biological prerequisite for pregnancy was lost on the ACLU. Unfortunately, it also seems lost on those who wrote the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021, passed by the House of Representatives in September. (“Health protection” is a euphemism that masks a radical abortion bill that seeks to nullify all state-level pro-life laws.)

Given the spirit of the times, drafters of the bill felt the need to defend their several uses of the term “women” in the title and text of the legislation. The word choice is meant, the bill explains, “to reflect the identity of the majority of people” seeking abortions.

In the actual text of the bill, further concessions to the transgender ideology are apparent. Perhaps this development should not be surprising in the context of an abortion bill. Erasing one biological reality (the reality of women as mothers) makes it easier to erase another (the right of the unborn child to live). But mark that down as one more disservice abortion advocates do to women.

Speaking truthfully is an important step in responding effectively to social challenges. Language must reflect created reality. Laws that deliberately omit, garble, or redefine half of the human race do not serve women, and put the entire society at risk.