Saving the Birthing People From Having to Birth
Saving the Birthing People From Having to Birth
Are women powerful or powerless?
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
The Left erased women. The “W” word, a concept so fundamental that every human culture and even animals understand it (proving that a donkey is smarter than a Democrat), vanished within a matter of years to be replaced by “birthing people”.
Now the Democrats vow to save the “birthing people” from having to “birth”.
Leftists used to accuse conservatives of reducing women to “baby-making machines” until they decided to go ahead and redefine women as “birthing machines” (which is completely different). That triumph of social justice, akin to spending a decade stamping out the use of “colored people”, only to resurrect it as “people of color”, was just another case of leftist projection.
Democrats spent generations reducing women to abortion or birthing people who don’t birth. Redefining womanhood as a state of mind that anyone, no matter how hairy, can identify with and become, eliminated all the other planks of the feminist agenda leaving only abortion.
And with Roe v. Wade on the ropes, the Left has women exactly where it wants them.
“Birthing people” emphasizes vulnerability. Even as it denies biological reality, it focuses on a very specific biological function, paring away everything else to play pregnancy gatekeepers.
The familiar game plan of identity politics is to reduce individuals to a group, and then to define that group in such a way that it appears perpetually vulnerable. “Birthing people”, like inventing the notion that every black person is just a police encounter away from sudden racist death, is the Marxist reductionism of everything that makes us human to power relationships.
To use “birthing people” is to define womanhood as a state of biological oppression in which there are only two states of being, pregnant or not, and making that into a partisan choice. To be pregnant is the fiendish plot of Republicans, while being saved from pregnancy is the noble work of Democrats. Gratitude means that birthing people” are expected not to quibble at the liberation of Bob wanting to be let into the bathroom or Mike wanting to join the swim team.
Collective liberation requires intersectional sacrifices from everyone. Especially women.
Permanent victimhood is perpetual oppression. Like the arsonist firefighter, leftists enslave the people they claim to be saving. After all, without a fresh supply of victims what would they do?
Manufacturing victimhood requires the destruction of the victim’s sense of control over their life.
Victims lose their dignity and their empathy, coming to see life as a vicious struggle that they are ill-equipped to survive on their own. The victim learns to hate everyone else because they have been taught that everyone is out to get them. They learn to take no responsibility for their own behavior because they believe that they are incapable of making meaningful choices.
This is the state of the diverse rainbow of victims rallying under the banner of social justice. It’s also the state to which the Left aspires to reduce every single human being it can brainwash.
This was the sorry state of much of the human race for most of human history. It’s still the state of the average person living in a third world dictatorship. And that’s no coincidence at all.
Every time America tries to introduce democracy to people who think like this, it fails miserably, just as it fails miserably in the slums ruled by Democrats, who have the same relationship to democracy as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, because freedom is not a system.
It’s a state of mind.
Convince people that they aren’t free and they’ll act that way no matter how many constitutional rights they might possess. And persuade people that they are free, and then no matter how oppressed they may be, they will not be subjugated without a long struggle and rivers of blood.
Americans were not free because they had a Constitution, they made a Constitution because they freed themselves. The failure to understand this important distinction led to this crisis.
The Left spent much of American history systemically convincing people that they were not free. The radical movement used every Constitutional right and every social freedom to seize control of the means of communication and indoctrination to force that core message through the system. To the extent that much of the country believes that it is not free, it has succeeded.
Abortion is one of its wedge issues. It’s a powerful wedge issue because it can be used to convince women that they’re powerless. The pro-choice movement, like every leftist slogan, is an inversion. Its actual message is that women don’t have a choice. That the “choice” is in the hands of two factions, only of which intends to allow women to choose as long as it’s in power.
What the Left wants from women is to replace actual choice with the illusion of a binary choice. Its message is the familiar one of Big Brother, that power comes from surrendering individualism, and that security can only be found in the ranks of angry mobs. That is what we were seeing outside the Supreme Court. And it is what we see throughout identity politics.
The Left gaslights its professional victims into nullifying everything about themselves except their greatest vulnerability which it promises that it can help them control. Power, the abortion movement tells the “birthing people” who used to be women, comes from not giving birth. The only way to maintain control over your life is to kill your children before they can be born.
Victims are notoriously easy to convince that preemptive aggression is self-defense, that the only way to be safe is absolute selfishness, and that their feelings are all that should matter.
Wokeness is the social manifestation of this state of mind in workplaces and universities.
The Left claims that it teaches pride and strength, but what it actually inculcates are the insecurities of shame and weakness. It reduces its victims to their worst and urges them to be proud of that and to lash out at anyone who might expect anything better from them.
Having erased women, the Left tells “birthing people” to take pride in dead children.