The GOP Wants to Define “Woman” by Reproductive Capability

What could possibly go wrong?

by Evan Urquhart

According to reporting in Politico, the GOP is taking the next logical step after attempting to troll Democrats by asking them to define the word woman. Now they are seeking to enshrine a definition of woman, based on reproductive capacity, in law.

Of course there are a great many women who can’t get pregnant, both cis and trans, and including all women after the onset of menopause. Many women also prefer not to have children, living rich, meaningful lives without doing so (this is also true of many men). But defining women by their ability to give birth, and women who don’t or can’t as defective or evil, is very much in line with conservative beliefs about gender roles. In a conservative worldview women should confine themselves to the role of bearing and raising children, leaving men to do everything else, and also to “head” the household and have final say about affairs in the home. (Many have noted that this view of the sexes as “equal” but suited to different roles is more properly called the total subordination of women by men.) The keystone to this belief system is that people are defined by the reproductive capacity, and that women in particular are defined by the ability (and the obligation) to become pregnant and give birth.

Enshrining into law a definition of woman as mere vessels for child-bearing is incredibly bad for cis women, and for the very idea that individual people should decide for themselves what their “role” in society is rather than having one placed on them by conservative politicians who claim to be speaking for God. It is also, of course, very bad for trans people to be legislatively defined out of existence. The calculation the GOP is making is that conservative voters will be so excited over the prospect of harming trans people they won’t notice that the door being thrown open to legal constraints and restrictions on women based on the idea that their purpose in life is is to give birth. Such constraints are already being seen in America post-Roe, with at least one Alabama woman being placed in jail for using drugs and endangering a pregnancy… despite never having been pregnant in the first place.

This is not a bug, but a feature. Conservatives want a definition of womanhood which makes it clear that pregnancy and child bearing is every woman’s purpose on earth, with ample room for legislative limitations and restrictons on women’s behavior in furtherance of that. Harming trans people is a side project, and a means to that end. That this is sometimes presented as protecting women, or even as some form of feminism, is a smokescreen. The reactionary strain of conservatism that is dominating Republican politics at the moment won’t stop until women are once again below men, both legislatively and socially.