Because Men Have Abortions Too

AC1 and the mighty Iowahawk steer us to an item of possible interest over at Feministing, where ideological extremity is the currency of status, and where Lori Adelman tells us,

Why I won’t be talking about abortion as a “women’s issue” anymore.

Readers hoping that the issue might be opened up as one also involving the male partners of women who choose abortion will, I fear, be disappointed. The ladies at Feministing have repeatedly made their feelings on that subject quite clear. Male grief at the loss of a child-to-be is - and can only be - “inauthentic,” “illegitimate” and an artefact of the all-powerful patriarchy. For a man to feel he has lost a child due to his partner’s termination is “appalling,” a “fantasy” and not to be “pandered” to.

Instead, Ms Adelman has stumbled across something much more pressing. Something that is,

Tangible, practical, and incredibly straightforward that we can all start doing right now to strengthen our trans activism and our reproductive justice work.

Those practical and straightforward steps include,

Stop saying and stop thinking that abortion is a women’s issue. That’s it. Pretty simple right? But incredibly important.

Why so, you ask?

Cause, the thing is, it’s not just women that have abortions. 

She is of course referring to the world-shaking insights of activist and gender trendsetter Jos Truitt, whose ponderings reveal,

Trans men have abortions. Gender queer people have abortions. Two spirit people have abortions. People who do not fit into the box of ‘woman’ have abortions. That’s the reality we live in.

Reality is a subject to which Ms Truitt refers on more than one occasion. Hers, though, appears to have features not commonly recognised: 

The reality that men can have abortions, men can get pregnant and give birth. 

News that may astound our more buttoned-down, stuffy and patriarchal readers. Indeed, several Feministing commenters anticipate such reservations:

Obviously, we’ll never have the support of the conservative right.

Others strike a more optimistic note:

To get people on board… they need to be educated.

Jos Truitt can be seen here educating an audience with tremendously deep and radical thought, thereby confirming Hampshire College’s status as a “radical space.” We learn, shockingly, that sex change surgery from female to male typically entails the patient losing the ability to bear children. This is described by Ms Truitt as “an issue of eugenics” and an affront to “reproductive justice.” Rather than, say, an obvious consequence of choosing to have the necessary organs removed in order to become more like the gender that, by definition, doesn’t bear children. Presumably a woman who feels male and wishes to undergo extreme surgery to gain some semblance of physical maleness should also retain a functional uterus and associated organs, perhaps cleverly connected to a decorative penis. An intriguing challenge for any ambitious surgeon.

Sharp-eyed readers may note that despite railing against the heinous “gender binary” that apparently oppresses all of us, Ms Truitt still chooses to present herself as an ostensibly female person. (Note, however, that Ms Truitt isn’t the panellist wearing the fetching little princess crown.) When not telling us about reality and how it really is, Jos Truitt enjoys bike-riding, bread making and “producing colourful abstract images about her gender identity.”

Lori Adelman, meanwhile, holds a BA in Social Studies from Harvard University.