“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” feminist writer Gloria Steinem started saying in 1971, attributing the phrase to an “elderly Irish woman driver” of a cab in Boston. You can tell it came from someone working-class rather than an academic or professional activist because it’s actually pithy writing. It connects. It references religion. Quite unlike the slogans made up by graduates of programs in This Theory or That-Studies, it’s actually funny. Is it true? Clearly not. The idea that there are smaller consequences for a man than for a woman when the two of them have sex and she gets pregnant is obviously true. But the idea that men don’t have some interest in whether they impregnate anyone, either a cynical personal economic interest or a higher moral one? Quite obviously false.
The slogan has also been rendered untrue, or obsolete, by the fact that what was absurd to believe in 1971, that men can and do get pregnant, is now necessary to believe. Elon Musk recently tweeted an emoji of a pregnant man at Bill Gates to bully him for his belly, which was how I learned that there is, for some reason, a pregnant man emoji. In a recent newsletter, Nellie Bowles ran down some of the phraseology that came out after the leak of the majority (as of February) Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade: “pregnant people rights,” “Black birthing people,” “birthing bodies,” and, as Planned Parenthood called this type of human being in December, “folks with a vulva.” These circumlocutions around just saying “woman” aren’t wrong, per se, but it sure is irritating that using them is a fad made up by the same exact people who a few years earlier made up the idea of “erasure.” And it’s hard to overstate how off-putting this is to most people, except by pointing out that “mother,” or at least “mama” or its equivalent, has probably been most human beings’ first word since we developed language.
That’s why it’s nice to see it being walked back. The Associated Press Stylebook released an alert a day after the opinion leaked, reading as follows: “Phrasing like pregnant people or people who seek an abortion seeks to include people who have those experiences but don’t identify as women, such as some transgender men and some nonbinary people. Such phrasing should be confined to stories that specifically address the experiences of people who do not identify as women.” A day later, the Trans Journalists Association’s Twitter account was similarly uncharacteristically reasonable about not following progressive logic down a dark alley that leads to talking about women like they are machines or like the very word is a curse: “It is unnecessary to avoid the word ‘women’ by substituting phrases like ‘birthing people,’ ‘people with uteruses’ and the like. This language can offend both transgender and cisgender people.”
Cool! Welcome! It’s always the right time to avoid arcane, nonsense phrasings that solve some puzzle activists worry about while alienating the majority of people who actually make up the electorate. Euphemism always tempts, but it must be resisted. Martin Luther King ran the Poor People’s Campaign, not the Individuals Less Fortunate Than Ourselves Working Group, because there’s actually never been a time when it isn’t urgent to talk how normal people talk. But while these are nice developments to see, they are so obvious it should not have taken political expediency to wring them out. It’s kind of maddening seeing left-wing organizations concede to the reality that calling mothers women just sounds saner and better and is a perfectly fine thing to do only now that they can see that something important depends on it. It always did.
