Tag Archives: Uterus

Can We End the Insulting “War on Women” Meme Now?

Lady Parts

Colorado Senator Mark Udall has a strong record of fighting back against surveillance state abuses. If I lived in Colorado, I would have considered voting for him, as the lesser of two evils, on that basis alone. Instead “Senator Uterus” squandered that advantage by running on the phony and demeaning “war on women.” Let us hope his defeat, along with that of Wendy Davis, sends this insulting meme to the quick death and deep burial it deserves.

Even the use of the word “war” is offensive.

War is the Rape of Nanking. It is the Sebrenica Massacre. War is the Rwandan Genocide. It is 45 million people dead in four years under Mao Ze-Dong and twenty million murdered or starved under Stalin.

War is the freakin’ Holocaust.

Acid attacks, honor killings, forced marriages, slavery, and stoning. Those things might rise to the level of a “war on women.”

Having to pay for your own birth control does not. Neither does a deadline of twenty weeks to terminate a pregnancy. If the wage gap was real (it is not), even that does not constitute “war.”

Using that word to describe anything experienced by women in the 21st century in the United States is an insult to my fortitude and intelligence, and to the victims of real wars all over the world.

But the meme does not stop there. It doubles down on this heaping pile of insult by treating certain issues as inherently interesting to women.

I am more than the sum of my “lady parts[1] and the issues inevitably lumped together under the rubric “women’s issues” hold little interest for me.

Abortion has been protected since 1973. Only 28% of women believe it should be legal in all circumstances. Like 72% of all women, I am not one of them. The wage gap has been massively and repeatedly debunked.[2] The right to purchase and use birth control has been protected since 1965, and I have been able to afford it since I took my first job as a teenager. To the extent I have political concerns about birth control, it is to support over-the-counter availability, as proposed by Udall’s Republican challenger, or to wonder: If birth control is so unaffordable, how are women to pay for the health insurance policies covering birth control as just one of many expensive mandates?

Here are my issues: I think the growth of the surveillance state is an unacceptable trade-off in the fight against terrorism. I worry that the U.S. is crossing moral lines in its reliance on drone warfare, and that we are getting bogged down in never-ending conflicts in the Middle East. I fear our overseas interventions constitute sprinkling water on little terrorist Mogwai. I want non-violent drug offenders released from prison and reunited with their families. I worry about inflation in consumer prices outpacing real increases to income. I believe free markets produce the most beneficial results and that minimum wage laws destroy jobs and harm low-income workers. I think government debt and deficits are immoral and untenable burdens to pass on to our children. I am opposed to restrictions on political speech.

I care passionately about each one of those things.

When politicians suggest I should instead be focused on free birth control or manufactured outrage over phantom discrimination, it is like they are saying, “Oh, don’t worry your little head about those other issues. Those are for the menfolk to work out.”

It is like I am being patted on the head and told, “You’re pretty smart…for a girl.”

To those on the left who want to keep this meme alive, please watch this video of a woman fall down, get back up and start running again. Then consider whether you really want to tell us you think buying our own birth control is too hard.

[1] Unlike man parts, lady parts are protected by U.S. law, both figuratively—as set forth in this post—and literally.

[2] When economists control for educations, occupations, positions, length of time in the workplace, hours worked per week, and other similar variables, the gap narrows to pennies on the dollar. It may not exist at all, since even the remaining gap may be explained by “legitimate wage differences masked by over-broad occupational categories,” lumping together such disparate professions as sociologists and economists or librarians, lawyers and professional athletes.

Sarah Baker is a libertarian, attorney and writer. She lives in Montana with her daughter and a house full of pets.