On a recent episode of her podcast, Michelle Obama said that “the least of what” a woman’s reproductive system does is “produce life.” The comment drew quick criticism — and for good reason. To be fair, Obama quickly added, “it’s a very important thing that it does,” but her initial statement confirmed a too-familiar callousness toward the miraculous process of producing a life.
Obama’s dismissiveness of childbearing, however, may be “the least of what” was revealed in her statements. The perpetually aggrieved Obama wants to lean back into a comfortable narrative in which women are victims and progressive Democrats like her are their champions. As she puts it:
So many men have no idea about what women go through, right? We haven’t been researched. We haven’t been considered. And it still affects the way a lot of male lawmakers, a lot of male politicians, a lot of male religious leaders, think about the issue of choice as if it’s just about the fetus. The baby.
Obama is right, of course, that no man knows the experience of inhabiting a female body, let alone the physical experience of growing another human being. This doesn’t mean that men shouldn’t weigh in on the issue of abortion, as Obama seems to imply, but certainly it’s good advice that men should take care to recognize the profound implications that any pregnancy has on a woman anytime they are discussing abortion.
Yet given the backdrop of the recent years’ roller-coaster reevaluation of the concepts of sex and gender identity, Obama’s words seem rather like a throwback. Is this Democratic Party elder really comfortable with such blanket statements that “men have no idea” about what women go through? What about all the supposed legions of “men” that the Biden administration obsessed about who need sanitary products, get pregnant, and struggle with “chest–feeding”?
And it wasn’t just a matter of Orwellian language games. The Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services rewrote legal guidance to remove “binary language” that would presume that women alone have this unique connection with childbearing; medical schools lectured midwives (though I have to assume they canceled that term too) and others involved in OB-GYN medical care that sex-based language was violence against women who identify as male. Luminaries such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez assured us that it’s far more respectful to refer to women as “bleeders” and “chest-feeders” than to risk “erasing” all the women who identify as men and all the men seeking to cosplay pregnancy and the breastfeeding of newborns.
Even with the distance of just a few months, it seems incredible that so many were willing to participate in this charade and twist our language and culture in a never-good-enough attempt to appease the demands of a loud, but small, unhinged minority. Some are still trying to ride the LGBTQIA+-speak wave, even though it crashed spectacularly on November 5 with President Trump’s election and sucked many of its adherents into the political abyss. But most Democrats, like Obama, seem relieved to be moving on and back to the solid ground of shared female experience, manipulating those common miraculous moments to resurrect the sisterhood of being victimized by the patriarchy.
Some might take issue with Obama’s use of the word “machine” to describe women’s bodies and reproductive systems as harkening to Handmaid’s Tale imagery of being hijacked as a vessel for procreation. Yet the machinery analogy is also useful. Women’s bodies are uniquely built and suited for the production of human life. Biological differences between men and women are not limited to the most visible secondary sex characteristics, and pregnancy and birth are a whole-body effort. Every cell of a woman’s body is indelibly marked female, as every man’s is male.
Any woman who has experienced it knows that pregnancy is a full-body experience. It’s not just your belly that grows in preparation for birth. Within a week or two of conception, women start noticing profound changes, including a heightened sense of smell, waves of nausea, vivid dreams, more sensitive skin, and so many other changes that are too numerous to list. The process doesn’t end but continues after birth, as a complex surge of hormones and chemicals washes through women’s bodies, helping them produce nutrients uniquely suited to just what their babies need to thrive.
Whether you view these realities as a blessing or a curse is irrelevant to the point that they are uniquely female. No Frankenstein surgeries or prescription regimens designed to make women appear male or vice versa can refashion men into the complex, lifegiving machine that is the female body.
Michelle Obama is right that anyone who cares about the health of the next generation should consider women’s health broadly. Women’s ability to nurture the next generation effectively and fully does depend on their physical, mental, and emotional health. Women’s health, even at this late date, is understudied. One can understand why more studies are done on men: Women’s chemical and hormonal makeup fluctuates daily as well as dramatically over the course of years, creating unique challenges for research. Yet that shouldn’t be an excuse to pretend that those complexities don’t exist and assume that women’s bodies are just smaller versions of men’s bodies.
Perhaps we are finally reaching a point when progressive leaders like Obama are becoming exhausted by pronoun games and what must be an emotionally draining betrayal of every feminist principle in the book by standing by as male rapists self-identify into women’s prisons and 6-foot-2-inch men rip gold medals and state championships out of the hands of demoralized girls. The public shouldn’t forget, however, that this retreat wasn’t the result of a come-to-Jesus realization about the deep differences between the sexes. If President Trump had lost, the LGBTQIA+ gender ideology tide would only be rising higher, turning more vulnerable young people into lifelong medical patients and destroying Title IX and all single-sex opportunities for women and girls.
Progressives weren’t going to abandon this cause without a stern rebuke from voters, and many persist in supporting its advancement, despite the potentially enormous political costs. That’s why we needed not only President Trump’s executive orders that define words such as “male” and “female” but to codify those terms in federal and state laws so they are solidly enforced in case the political winds change again.
Michelle Obama’s statement, though, shows that reality — both political and biological — is making a comeback. It couldn’t happen soon enough.