The Abort73 Blog: Insights From a Transgender Abortion

By Michael Spielman

Published July 16, 2024

Entering this month, Abort73 had published 816 abortion stories. These unsolicited accounts have come to us from all over the world—mostly from women, but also from some grieving fathers as well. But then something unprecedented happened on America’s 248th birthday. From across the pond, Abort73 received its first ever abortion story from a transgender man. That is to say, from a woman who now calls herself a man. I realize, of course, that even that disclaimer pigeonholes me as a bigot. Transgender men are men (as the orthodoxy goes), but that’s a premise I’m unwilling to affirm.

For virtually all of human history, it was understood that men can’t get pregnant. That, in essence, is what makes men men. “If men could get pregnant,” Gloria Steinem famously quipped in 1971, “abortion would be a sacrament.” But even then, her thinking was flawed. Because if men could get pregnant, they wouldn’t be men; they’d be women. Fifty years later, Steinem’s assertion has become positively medieval to those on the left—along with her opposition to pornography and prostitution. One of the difficulties in being a 90-year-old feminist, as The Guardian put it some years back, is that it’s “not easy to be an old hand in a political movement the very nature of which is… to interrogate and reject the assumptions of [all that] came before.” Yesterday’s vices are today’s vanguard.

We might assume that an old-guard feminist like Gloria Steinem wouldn’t risk women’s safety and opportunity just to gain political points. But we’d be wrong. Instead of sticking to her guns and insisting that men can’t get pregnant (or compete in women’s volleyball), she told Cathy Newman in 2015 that “each person has a right to define themselves.” Feminism, apparently, is no longer about advancing the rights of women. It’s about rejecting traditional roles and expectations—wherever they’re found. “We need to change society to suit the individual,” Steinem demanded, “not the individual to suit society.” And then she assured Newman that “we aren’t there yet.” But that goes without saying. When there is no finish line, there can be no arrival. Only perpetual deconstruction. If the goal is to improve the prospects of women, that has a modicum of achievability, but if the goal is to simply destroy social structure wherever it exists, that is a task without end.

Now that it’s become fashionable to pretend that men can get pregnant and have babies, we must brace for the real-world fallout—some of which arrived in Abort73’s inbox this past Independence Day. Because, while “let people define themselves” might sound noble as an abstract principle, it’s devastating in practice. The phenomenon of men pretending to be women presents the more obvious threat, but the problem of women pretending to be men has dangers all its own—as evidenced by last year’s school shooting in Nashville and the aborting of children whose “dads” didn’t think they could get pregnant. That was the case in our most recent abortion story. You can read it in its entirety on the Abort73 website, but I’m going to share portions of it here. Before I do, I should say a word about pronouns.

Continue here.