Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

With Roe v. Wade on the Ropes, the Left Has Women Exactly Where It Wants Them

By

Are women powerful or powerless?

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.

Comments

  1. A very sophisticated essay. Much wisdom in it. I particularly liked the line, “Permanent victimhood is perpetual oppression.”

  2. they are worst than the time of herod they are all murderers!!!!

    ABORTION IS MURDER!!!!

    STOP ABORTION NOW!!!

    • Abortion is the absolute right of self-defense. There are defenses to the charge of homicide – the right to defend against physical death, physical injury and substantial physical pain. Justifiable homicide in all 50 States.

      • YES. In addition, preventing the birth of extremely deformed babies who have little chance of survival. To all the God worshippers, please explain why your ‘Creator’ allows millions of innocent babies to suffer such hideous fates?

      • Yes, we must stop the slaughter being wrought by those blood thirsty fetuses’.

    • The historical record show the King Herod was not alive at the time of Jesus’ alleged birth,
      so the massacre is mythical and never took place, like so much else in the bible

      • Herod the Great died in 4 BCE. It’s accepted by all informed people that Jesus was born before Herod died, as the Bible says, so 5-6 BCE, not 1 AD, as was always believed by uninformed people.

        • The truth, M. Tiro, and thank you for *informing the uninformed.*

          The Bible is True.

        • thank you, John. we who understand the Truth, must take a stand for it…even if it unpopular.

    • Terry Pratchett (Disc world) made the comment “multiple exclamation marks is a sign of a diseased mind”.
      Was he on to something?

  3. This idea that abortion is a woman’s right comes from the thinking that the purpose of sexual intercourse is for pleasure. That is not correct. Sexual intercourse is for reproduction. The part about sex being pleasurable is the result of natural selection over the span of many thousands of years. People who like to have sex produce children who like to have sex and people who don’t like to have sex have very few or no children at all. Therefore, most human beings like to have sex and so, yes, I understand the urge to have sex is very strong in most human beings. But still, the purpose of sex is to reproduce and no one should ever forget that.

    In the U.S. Christianity and the churches once held the major role in teaching people about the importance of controlling the urge to have sex but now … people don’t care what the churches have to say. So we are where we are, arguing about what a woman is and not even knowing when a person becomes a human being.

    Now the government has taken over the role of the churches, feeding the hungry and providing clothing and shelter to the poor — even raising their children. The people want the government to take care of them from the moment of birth to the time of death. Well, the thing nobody is talking about is when does the government’s responsibility for doing this for a person begin? Is it at the moment the umbilical cord is cut or is it sometime even before that? Just when does a human being become human and when does the government’s responsibility to protect a human being begin? Even if the decision is that the start time is not at the moment of conception, I say just make some kind of decision on the matter and let’s go from there. Instead we are in chaos – there is no leadership in the U.S. anymore – just selfish, angry people wanting the most pleasure out of life that they can get any way they can get it.

    • those who want to be free to murder their babies, are blaming the churches. One in Boulder, CO was vandalized with references to the SCOTUS paper.

      • Yes, instead these people should be direct their energy into getting a law passed taht define when a human being becomes a human being. But no matter whether it’s the church or the state making the decision a whole lot of people are not going to like whatever it is. But at least Christians will be a lot more peaceful about things than hedonists. I have a feeling the people who aren’t opposed to violence won’t be happy until abortion is allowed up the time the baby takes it’s first breath after the umbilical cord is cut.

        • Yes, they are aware that Christians deal peacefully and take insults without killing other people. Those who kill the unborn, will stop at nothing to get their way.

          In the state of MD, some “lawmaker” there has drafted a bill saying a woman can commit infanticide up to 28 days **after** the baby is born. He wants it to be if the woman just ignores the child and allows it to starve to death, that’s fine…up to nearly a month after birth.

        • A woman who would do that to her baby is insane and the baby should be taken away from her. I see it as cruel and unusual punishment – and for having committed no crime at all.

        • I agree. And the scum who wants her to be allowed to, is a son of satan. He may as well make an image of molech for his home and office.

    • “This idea that abortion is a woman’s right comes from the thinking that the purpose of sexual intercourse is for pleasure. That is not correct. Sexual intercourse is for reproduction”.

      Good grief! One of the stupidest claims I’ve ever seen. If sex was not so intensely pleasurable there would be NO REPRODUCTION!
      Please give God a rest – and learn to THINK.

      • I think you completely missed my point and you are the one who needs to think a little more.

  4. I read this in FPM, but don’t have a commenting account there. Well written, Mr. Greenfield.

    There once was a saying about keeping women barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. Some looked at that as a kind of slavery…as if no woman had a choice in the matter. Some women had chosen to get married, have babies and take care of the home while the husband…a male person…worked for an income and took care of the family in ways the women didn’t.

    Then the lines became blurred and women were able to do everything…even be “husbands” to other women; but to have kids, they had to go to a clinic or get a male person to help out.

    I believe all of this is the work of satan the devil. God created man and woman and told them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” Jesus Christ reaffirmed that when He was speaking to the crowds about marriage, divorce, adultery and fornication.

    Now, people say “birthing people” as if just anyone can give birth; “transman” as if women can become men, and a whole host of other nonsense that goes against the Truth of what is the reality of Creation.
    Claims are being made about “miscarriages being investigated,’ ..per. e. warren; “White men shouldn’t have any say” on the issue; and other angry voices coming from every direction.

    Some women have said no more “hookups” for them…and Gallup reported that nearly 93% of baby-killing is done without a “reason” being given….apart from the tiny %’s for incest, rape, deformity in the child, threat to the mother’s life, emotional or financial…which proves that the women hooking up got pregnant and then “got rid” of the babies that resulted. Lazy convenience.

    It should be a conversation about the babies, but it’s all about the “woman’s body” and her “choice.”
    Women have been given a legal standing to murder their children. (it is not a **right**)
    Seems strange when it’s still against the law for a man to murder his wife or a woman to murder her husband; or either to murder a store clerk, or fast food server, or a judge….when any of these may do damage to the individual, while the poor babies are not doing any wrong.

    Wicked and evil…straight from satan the devil.

    • somehistory,

      I’d like your opinion.

      I’m sure that you are familiar with IVF (in vitro fertilization), and it typically results in unused embryos.

      There are really only four alternatives for these unused embryos:

      1. Indefinite cryopreservation.

      2. Donating to another couple.

      3. Donating to research – which results in their unviability.

      4. Destroying.

      Thoughts?

      • James,

        thank you for asking for my thoughts. I never liked the idea of this…I know that some people want a baby so badly that they’ll try anything offered, and I feel a lot of sympathy for them. I know how much babies have to give to mommy and daddy. but I would never want to go that route.

        Since there are people who go that route, I would have to say that giving the baby to another couple would be the best answer.
        It brings to my mind the story from the Bible about King Solomon and the two women who had babies, with one killing…by accident…her child and the other mom, who loved her baby more, giving the child up so he could go on living.

        If a couple cannot raise all of the babies produced by this procedure, it’s so much better to give them a chance with someone who will love and care for them, rather than be frozen forever, or destroyed by any means.
        I believe the couple giving up the babies for adoption should have a say in who would receive them.

    • The question to ask is what is the main driving force behind this movement? I contend that it is that part of the Biotech industry that wants to get ahead by using real human body spare parts to provide hapless patients who might need some organ or other due to any illness. They are the ones who have most to gain by the abortion of babies in their 2nd and 3rd trimesters, as they then get more developed organs to play w/

      This use of fetal body parts needs to be legislatively banned nationwide, if the financial backing behind the abortion movement is to be collapsed

      • Yes, it is all about money and power. they like to play like they can be gods, and decide who lives and who dies and when and how.
        It’s all demonic.
        as long as people make money, and can buy politicians, this will continue and even get worse.
        the scum in the house voted to allow baby-killing iin the third trimester, and the senate is trying to force it through, so no matter what the court says, they can keep states for regulating it. they don’t give one iota how much pain it causes the babies.

      • Infidel says,

        “This use of fetal body parts needs to be legislatively banned nationwide, if the financial backing behind the abortion movement is to be collapsed”

        Agree.

        Perhaps the only exception would be the products of a spontaneous abortion, but there is the issue of fraud.

        • No, the moment you have a carveout, like you said, fraud will merrily make its way in, like the proverbial camel in the tent. Except for umbilical cord blood cells, no fetal tissue gets to be used for research or even treatments

        • Very true, like exceptions for “rape” and other stuff. women will claim it when they know full well they consented.

          I may sound crazy to many, but I believe there should be no exceptions to the law if there is a law against baby killing. Babies who are ill-formed most frequently result in miscarriages, and many mothers who face ill health, can be helped by caring doctors. I know personally of some who had such situations and the babies were born okay and the mother survived to take care of her newborn.
          I have also seen many kids with birth defects make life a success because they were allowed to live.
          Just a couple of days ago, I read testimony a doctor gave to members of congress explaining how the mother’s life may be endangered at some point, but he has had many patients like that and lost none…with healthy babies being delivered.

        • somehistory,

          To your point, I had a sister who was born with a very rare genetic abnormality.

          After my mother gave birth, she was in the hospital for about a year. She was finally stable enough so that my parents could bring her home.

          For the next 3 1/2 years, she was a full-fledged member of our family. She was highly intelligent and loved us all.

          She died at the age of 4 1/2 years due to her disease.

          At the time, I was 12 years old and it was the worst day of my life.

          But I am thankful for the time that I had with her.

        • James,

          I’m so sorry you lost your little sister, but glad you had special time with her. and that you can look on that as a positive.

          I put a lot of faith in the promise of Jesus who said, “All those in the memorial tombs will hear His (my) voice and come out.”

        • James

          That’s a tragic thing that happened to your sister. Like Somehistory, I’m happy for the brief time you did have w/ her

    • Thanks for that link, Somehistory.

      I think that any such surgeries–as well as “hormone therapy”–should not be performed on children. If an adult wants to pursue this, this is their right–but not done to children, who are often easily influenced and too young to make such decisions.

      • you;re welcome, g.

        and, it is so deceitful for some in favor to make the claim that these can be reversed.

        If a child is too young to decide if they want to go to school, what time to go to bed, how much ice cream to eat, when to get a driver’s license, for whom to vote…then by cracky, they are way too young to decide to do something like trying o completely change who and what they are.

  6. Yesterday, on Breitbart’s morning program on Sirius XM’s Patriot channel, I was listening to John Nolte list 2 feminist arguments that the Left totally eviscerated on this issue of abortion:

    ‣ The “No man can get pregnant” argument – until the middle of the last decade, that was a somewhat solid argument that was made, even though fathers were left w/ the short end of the stick. But w/ this Trans movement, the “Reproductive Justice” movement that now claimed that men could get pregnant, using the example of women trans-“men”, the Left took away this one argument that the NARAL crowd had. After all, if “men” could get pregnant, how could they be denied a voice on this issue? ?
    ‣ The “My body, my choice” argument – an argument that has been so eviscerated by the vaccine mandates that it’s hard for pro-abortion feminists, who are mainly leftists who supported these mandates, to credibly claim this as a rationale

    In the meantime, wish all you mothers birthing people in advance a very happy Mother’s Birthing People’s Day ?

    • Infidel, I was listening to KCBS this morning when they played a clip from a pro-abortion demonstration in San Francisco. The speaker said that this affected ‘not just women, but anyone with a uterus”.

      Just a few years ago everyone would have considered this an absurd comment.

      • Graven

        That response is too funny for words

        That’s probably the reason that Matt Walsh is doing a world tour asking as many women as he can the same question that Marsha Blackburn asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: “What is a woman”

        Maybe that will be a documentary as long as he chooses to make it, w/ just the answers

  7. With Roe v. Wade on the Ropes, the Left Has Women Exactly Where It Wants Them
    …………….

    Very good but grim article.

    By the way, when I was first at Berkeley a few days–this was in 1977–I went to a demonstration billed as a women’s rights rally. To my shock it was all about abortion, which had just been legal a few years at that point. One woman was introduced as having had *four abortions*, and she received a standing ovation. I wasn’t completely sure how I felt about abortion at the time, but that any woman would be so cavalier about aborting multiple babies shocked and disgusted me.

    • g,
      It’s truly sickening the way these women celebrate the killing of their children…being proud of how many and bragging. One woman had a sign, ‘abortions save lives; ask me how.”

      I can’t stand to listen to them describe how they so easily disposed of their babies; like taking out the trash, or flushing the toilet.

      I saw a lady rep, I believe from MA, yelling at a group of protestors that she had murdered her baby and pointing at each one and saying, “you’re a murderer, and you’re a murderer” at every woman in the crowd. she must truly regret murdering her own.

    • While watching an abortion report on Newsmax, I saw a still of an abortion demonstration that had one placard held by a woman that said, “I wish my mother had aborted me”. This movement has long morphed from something that was about a woman’s ability to end unwanted pregnancys to something that’s now some sort of a religious (for want of a better term) sacrament

      It’s like the White-hatred that’s widespread among the woke crowd. Ten or twenty years ago, the White-haters were mainly Blacks who had a false sense of history, and who hated Whites b’cos of the perception that Whites were the ones behind slavery, Jim Crow and all that stuff. Whereas today’s White-haters are Whites who condemn someone just for being White. I saw a cartoon some days ago on Babylon Bee that had me in splits: it showed a Klan membership drive that ended up w/ a multiracial Klan ? ?

      https://youtu.be/9Yf7fX4m-9c

      • there was a movie some years ago, where one of the main characters was a Black man and I didn’t watch all of it, but he was being invited to join the klan.

        I don’t recall the name of it, but I believe it was something about ‘horses.’ If I recall correctly, the other main guy was Gene Wilder.

  8. I am very disappointed in Greenfield. This is a very specious article and his use of ‘intersectionality’ a word in fact invented by the woke left, is hypocritical to says the least; also his use of emotive terms like ‘murdered children, an aborted fetus is not a ‘murdered child’. And what about the high number of miscarriages? is a woman who has one of those going to be put in jail for her misfortune? I am not sure of the figures but I have read that a large number of pregnancies do not come to term
    The anti abortion lobby should also give thought to the unwanted children of women who are unable to get abortions for various reasons, usually the underprivileged of US society. Children also brought up by single mothers struggling to stay afloat economically. This is not to say mothers cannot successfully achieve this, but it takes hard work and strong character, not to mention intelligence, all of which probably influenced the impregnation in the first place. I have always though that the high rates of crime and drug addiction particularly in the coloured community can be traced to this lack of male support.
    What about masturbation are men going to be penalised for the millions of lost children consequent on ‘wasted’ semen? I do not think so. Men make laws for women to obey, which is pretty much like Islam is it not?
    I believe in most S. American countries where the RC religion is dominant, it is almost impossible to get abortions even in rape cases, does the USA want to be like that?

    • bill: I am actually pro-choice (just barely) but wouldn’t a society that was as moral as a society could be—-and I am talking pure theory here—be pro-life? Since there is a debate among reasonable minds when life begins, isn’t the fetus entitled to the benefit of the doubt, just along pure ethical lines, never mind any religious beliefs, and irrespective of how that innocent fetus is conceived. After all, the fetus is never guilty of anything.

    • How *dare* anyone use “emotive terms” about murdered children?

      Then, how dare anyone get upset about Jihad terror? Bad dhimmis!

      • bill sounds like e. warren in making the claim that women whose babies are lost through miscarriage are going to be investigated and jailed.

        he makes many false claims in his comment.
        to stop the beating of the human heart …deliberately…is murder. to rip the living human body to shreds and remove organs, is murder.

  9. “Birthing machines”? Never heard of it, don’t believe it, maybe some braindead fools use it.
    This is not a ‘thing’ in the real world!

  10. Jihad Watch

    Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

    Getting ever further off topic. PLEASE don’t!

    • You may have missed it, but if you look at the URL, it’s now RobertSpencer.org. There are two parts to this – Jihad Watch, which is on the right column of the site and reports on jihad and muslim supremacy, and the Left Column, which talks about the enablers of jihad. If it weren’t for the latter, this war against jihad would be pretty smooth. Imagine if the Dems as well as establishment Republicans had the same attitude towards islam that they have towards Russia: we would be in so much better a place

      Ten years ago, RS was pretty neutral, hoping to attract people from the Left as well to oppose jihad, given how islam is anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-animals, pro-slavery…. Very few Liberals joined the cause, and on the contrary, there developed a Left-Islam alliance, borne out of a shared hatred of the West and of freedom. That’s a good part of what caused RS to ultimately pick sides: there’s no point remaining neutral if one side is always gonna be against what you stand for

    • This story is not at Jihad Watch, but on “The Left Column”. This has been pointed out before.

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