Finalist: Monica Hesse of The Washington Post

The right to choose abortion is vital, even when women don’t choose it

So they did it, finally. A campaign decades in the making to overturn abortion rights in America came to fruition on Friday at 10:10 a.m. Eastern time. “Hey hey, ho ho, Roe v. Wade has got to go,” antiabortion activists had been yelling outside a barricaded Supreme Court, and then, all of a sudden, it went. A hush fell on the crowd as news of the decision trickled to the street, and then the hush turned to a cheer, and that’s what it looks like when rights are stripped away from women around the country, I guess. A hideous little party.

Here’s what I found myself thinking about while I watched those buoyant antiabortion activists — so many of whom were young women who branded themselves the “Post-Roe Generation” without yet being weighed down by life experiences to know what that meant. I found myself thinking about life experiences. Not about the abortions women will no longer be able to have, but about the choices they will no longer be able to make.

The first abortion I didn’t have was in college. My period was five days late — at random, it turns out, due to stress from exams, blah blah blah — but in the five days before it arrived, I’d already Googled the nearest Planned Parenthood. The second abortion I didn’t have was in my 30s. Birth control had been religiously employed, and yet there they were: two pink lines and a future I’d never planned. While I tried to warm to the idea of motherhood, nature resolved the situation in the form of a miscarriage.

The third abortion I didn’t have was my daughter. That time, everything was planned. I was ready, and the reason I knew I was ready was that I didn’t think about an abortion, I thought about a baby name.

As America waited like a rabbit in headlights for this decision to come down (and it turns out what we got was pretty much what the draft opinion had said we were going to get, Samuel Alito in all of his caustic, 19th-century glory), I heard from a lot of women about their abortions. But I heard from just as many women about the abortions they didn’t have. The options that were open to them. The choices they knew were theirs to choose, and the futures that unfurled because of that.

A friend was 16. First boyfriend, first broken condom. She went to her mother even before going to the drugstore for a pregnancy test. Her mother immediately said, “You don’t have to have a baby, we’ll get this taken care of.” The test turned out to be negative, but 20 years later, she still remembers her mother’s calm reassurance and the flood of relief that came with it.

Another friend told me about going to the doctor for an ultrasound in her second trimester. The sonographer’s lips pursed into a frown instead of a smile, then she scurried off to find a doctor. While my friend waited for more tests, she thought about how she might need to end a wanted pregnancy, because continuing it in those circumstances would have been, in her mind, unspeakably cruel.

False alarm, though. The baby was fine. She didn’t have to make the terrible decision, but she later told me that the only mercy she could find while waiting for those test results was in the idea that the terrible decision would at least have been hers.

“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Alito wrote. He meant that the issue should be taken away from the Supreme Court, but what it actually means is that the issue of women’s uteruses will be taken away from women.

Women have been talking to me about their own pasts. Back when they were still virgins, back when they were in high school and health class was displaying condoms rolled onto bananas, back when horny students were encouraged to take optimistic purity pledges. These then-girls weren’t even having sex yet, but abortion still existed in their minds as the second half of an if/then equation. If you got pregnant, then...

I don’t think many men realize that — that abortion is a procedure many women have considered at least once in their lives, even if considering it meant deciding they would never do it.

The point was not having an abortion, Justice Alito. The point was knowing that your life didn’t have to be ruined. The point was that if you became accidentally pregnant, you didn’t have to give up the scholarship, the graduate program, the cross-country move. You didn’t have to be trapped in a miserable relationship by the financial needs of a baby. A single mistake didn’t have to punish you forever.

For some abortion opponents, this freedom was their primary argument for reversing Roe v. Wade. The most common word that I hear abortion opponents use when discussing the issue is “consequences,” as in, “If a girl has sex, she should be prepared to accept the consequences.”

But access to abortion didn’t provide a life without consequences. It provided a life in which consequences were proportional.

Women have been talking to me about their children. How much they love them. How important it is that they had chosen to have them. These women became pregnant in a time and place in which they could have chosen to end their pregnancies. But sometimes it’s the appearance of an exit ramp that makes you realize you want to stay on the highway after all. Sometimes a person needs to know they don’t have to in order to realize how much they want to.

This is what was lost on the giddy steps of the Supreme Court on Friday morning. This is what is lost in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s not the abortions we would have had. It’s the abortions we wouldn’t have had. We are losing the idea that we were the best stewards of our own bodies and our own futures — our right to self-determination. We are losing the reassuring voices of our pragmatic mothers saying, You don’t have to do this. And we are losing the freedom to decide to do it anyway, if that’s what we want.

The abortions we didn’t have are as formative as the ones we did. They are the roads we took. They are the roads we took without ever dreaming that all other roads would be taken from us.

Two times during the birth of my daughter, I idly wondered if I might die. The first time was due to a severely botched epidural. The second was due to an infection that no doctors knew was an infection because no doctors performed an exam. They dropped in during rounds and nodded benignly when I described breathtaking pain. “You did just give birth, you know,” one joked, as I tried to protest that, no, this was a whole different thing. It wasn’t until three days later, feverish and barely able to walk, that I went to my regular OB/GYN who told me my stitches had burst and I needed antibiotics, stat. She asked if I wanted her to take an iPhone picture of my whole down there situation so I could see what she was talking about, and I said no thanks, just the drugs.

I should have said yes to the photograph. I should have made a poster of the photograph and brought it to statehouses around the country to hold it up for the lawmakers and judges who insisted that abortion is a bloody, violent, life-threatening procedure.

No, you dillweeds. Childbirth is the bloody, violent, life-threatening procedure. It is 14 times more likely to cause death than abortion, according to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists. And seeing as millions more women have just been sentenced to go through it, we should all see what it looks like in graphic, gory detail.

For the past 50 years, gory images have been the provenance of antiabortion activists: dismembered fetuses, tiny fingers, photographs of babies in utero at 25 or 30 weeks gestation — even though 93 percent of all abortions take place before 13 weeks, according to a recent Pew Research data roundup. Those that take place late in pregnancies are frequently due to fetal abnormalities that would result in stillbirth or near-immediate death.

Abortion rights advocates had cheeky slogans (“I dream women will one day have the same rights as guns”). But they also had the law on their side, so they didn’t need to fight dirty.

The bloody images antiabortion protesters used to characterize abortion care, misleading or dishonest as they were, tended to provoke a reaction that was visceral. And damned if they didn’t leave an impression.

“The argument for abortion, if made honestly, requires many words: It must evoke the recent past, the dire consequences to women of making a very simple medical procedure illegal,” wrote Caitlin Flanagan in a 2019 article in the Atlantic. “The argument against it doesn’t take even a single word. The argument against it is a picture.”

This isn’t true, though. The argument for abortion could also be made with a picture. It’s a picture of the mutilated, bloody flesh that comes from a traumatic delivery or from a back-alley abortion. It’s a picture of septic shock. It is a picture of a dead woman.

“We who oppose the annihilation of our bodily autonomy ought to plaster statehouses with photos of our episiotomy incisions, our Caesarean scars, our intravenous-line hematomas, our bloody postnatal sanitary pads and bloodstained bedsheets, our cracked nipples and infected breasts,” wrote Kate Manning in a column in The Washington Post in May.

She went on to say that these complications are considered par-for-the-course in matters of childbirth, and that women who want children (of which she was one, of which I was one) assume these risks because they know some of them are necessary to birth a baby. She also went on to say that for those who do not want children, childbirth constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Whether you agree with her, what is unarguable is that the severity of childbirth has been sanitized in popular and political culture. It has been downgraded to a few comedic screams in movies (“You did this to me!” the wife shouts at her husband), or to a weary-cheery “It was hard, but worth it!” in polite conversation.

The dangers of illegal abortions have been sanitized, too. Fifty years have passed since we last trod this ground. The women who died of illegal abortions (and numbers are impossible to ascertain, because these deaths often went unreported or mischaracterized) have been confined to historical statistics rather than into stark, unflinching photographs that protesters might wave on the steps of the Supreme Court.

The current de facto image of a wire coat hanger with a line through it — referencing illicit abortions performed with household objects — is not going to be enough in this new world. It’s an aging code, and a euphemism, meaningless to those who don’t already get it. I remember spotting a decal with such a symbol stickered subversively on a dormitory wall and asking a younger relative if she knew what it meant. “It means,” she guessed, “that you’re not allowed to hang clothes there?”

One reason we have never fully pulled back the curtain on reproductive gore is because doing so would require something we have been cultured to find unseemly, offensive or whiny. It would require centering women’s pain. It would require a compassionate examination of women’s bodies — not as sexual objects or maternal Madonnas but as the scarred, pulpy battlefields that reproduction can cause them to become.

It would require insisting that women’s suffering matters and that fairly legislating against abortion necessitates everyone knowing exactly what kind of suffering mandatory childbirth will inflict. Maybe describing that suffering with images is necessary because words can’t capture it and many people simply can’t imagine it.

It gives me no pleasure to suggest this. I don’t particularly want to rant about my alarming childbirth story, and I don’t want to exploit other women’s bodies. Already, women are unfairly required to spend too much time demanding that they be seen as human beings. Over the weekend, a Twitter thread went viral in which a woman described, with detail both clinical and pummeling, learning at 17 weeks pregnant that her baby would not survive. She ended up having a medically necessary abortion.

I have no doubt that reading this woman’s account made people think about abortion in a different way. I have no doubt that writing it sliced out a piece of her soul.

But this is where we are. Roe is gone, and so we should throw out the euphemisms, the metaphors, the pictures of coat hangers along with it. I think this could be effective. It’s been effective before.

In 1964, a Connecticut woman named Gerri Santoro checked into a hotel with her boyfriend and a textbook, which the couple planned to refer to in order to self-perform an abortion. She was estranged from her abusive husband at the time, but she’d learned he was coming to visit her and their children and she was terrified of what would happen if he found her pregnant.

Her body was found the next morning by a maid.

Police arrived to photograph the scene.

Here is what you see in one of the police photographs: a naked woman on splayed knees, her body slumped forward, almost as if she is praying, more likely that she collapsed on the spot. Her face is mashed into the carpet. Her right arm is bent awkwardly to her side. Her buttocks are covered in blood. Her genitals are covered in blood. Bloody towels lie beneath her body. In one hand, she holds another towel, this one unsullied, as if she might have planned to use it to stanch the bleeding that could not be stanched.

It was at once intimate, clinical, horrifying and nauseating. When I first saw this photo, I went into the bathroom and dry-heaved.

Ms. magazine published it. In 1973, they put this photo in their pages for all the world to see, pairing it with the original Roe v. Wade decision and running under the headline “Never Again.” Editors said they wanted their readers to know exactly what was at stake. And readers were galvanized, because anyone who saw this photo would agree: This should never happen again. For a time, Gerri Santoro became the face of the abortion rights movement, until we mistakenly thought those rights were safe.

This is a terrible photograph. This is the kind of photograph that nobody should have to look at. This is the kind of photograph that the country needs to see.

People seemed all too eager to dismiss a horrifying story that made a good case for why abortion can be merciful.

Last week, a wretched story came out of Ohio. A 10-year-old girl — a rape victim, in case that needs spelling out — was pregnant and in need of an abortion. But the overturning of Roe v. Wade had prompted a statewide ban on terminations after six weeks of pregnancy, so this child was going to either birth her alleged rapist’s baby or have to cross state lines to end her miserable situation. A physician named Caitlin Bernard had consulted on the case and spoke about it to Indiana news source IndyStar.

The case generated headlines and a mention by President Biden — “Just imagine being that little girl,” he said — and then some parties began to wonder aloud whether the story was so wretched it couldn’t be true. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) said that there was “not a damn scintilla of evidence” to corroborate the story. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) tweeted, “It looks like the story was fake to begin with.” A reporter with the Daily Caller presented, as apparent evidence the story was a concoction, the fact that the physician who had publicized the case declined to offer additional information.

Other members of the media also cast doubt on the story. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board criticized Biden for perpetuating an “unlikely story from a biased source that neatly fits the progressive narrative but can’t be confirmed.” The Washington Post Fact Checker column wrote cautiously about the case, particularly the fact that it was attributed to a single source (the physician) and to the fact that abortions performed on 10-year-olds are “pretty rare.” (“The intent of the piece was to spotlight the need for careful reporting in a time when information spreads rapidly,” said Shani George, vice president of communications for The Washington Post, in a statement.)

Then on Wednesday, a new development: a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch attended the arraignment of the alleged rapist, Gerson Fuentes, 27, who police said confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions.

So the story was real, God help us all.

This wasn’t cause for gloating. When a child becomes pregnant before she’s lost her last baby tooth and the state she lives in tries to make her stay that way, there are no winners; we have all irreparably lost.

But we need to stop and reflect for a minute on how some people reacted to this story when it first became public. Because it was a disaster.

Beginning with the journalists: A physician in good standing had gone on the record to discuss the case of the 10-year-old. In every other medical story I can think of, a doctor sharing the story of a patient would be considered highly credible. If a surgeon describes removing a tumor for a broader article on new surgical techniques, we do not demand to talk to the cancer survivor. What, precisely, did my fellow members of the media think the doctor — bound by HIPAA — should have done? Provide a press release with the name and address of an underage sexual assault victim?

If members of the media thought the doctor was lying — and their dubious takes implied no better explanation — then they could have employed other investigative methods of verifying the story. That’s what the Star and Dispatch reporters apparently did. They combed public records and ended up sitting in the courtroom as a judge considered bail for the alleged perpetrator of this monstrous crime. (After the alleged rapist’s arrest, The Washington Post added an update to the Fact Checker story and published a news story about the arrest. The Wall Street Journal and the Daily Caller also published new pieces.)

Moving onto the attorney general: In an interview, Yost said: “I know the cops and prosecutors in this state. There’s not one of them that wouldn’t be turning over every rock, looking for this guy and they would have charged him. They wouldn’t leave him loose on the streets.” But this ignores the fact that sexual assault crimes are undercharged, that rapists do end up “loose on the streets,” all the time. Only about 30 percent of sexual assaults are ever reported to the police, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, and fewer than 1 percent end in a conviction.

Cops and prosecutors can turn over every rock they encounter, but that doesn’t address common scenarios when it comes to child rape. Young girls often aren’t attacked by strangers who hide under rocks; they are attacked by their own fathers, stepfathers and uncles, who coerce silence from their vulnerable victims by threatening to harm the girls’ families. It’s not rare that 10-year-olds are assaulted, it’s rare that their attackers are actually caught and punished.

Finally, ending with the politicians and pundits who decided that throwing a 10-year-old and her doctor under the bus was the best move for their political movement.

Of course they would prefer that the story was a fiction. Admitting that the story was true would require admitting that there are some cases in which abortion is not only a necessity, it is a mercy. It is not only acceptable, it can be moral.

It is not life-ending for a potential child, it is lifesaving to an existing child, a 10-year-old girl, who had been raped, allegedly, by a man nearly three times her age and who now was facing the prospect of putting her small feet into stirrups and being ripped asunder by the act of labor. Maybe a C-section would have been employed. Would that have been better? Major surgery on a child who we forced to bear another child?

Apologies for the graphic imagery, but this is a graphic story.

A girl was assaulted, and then she was punished again by her government, and then she was doubted by journalists whose job it is to seek truth, and then she was used as a political pawn by politicians who were inconvenienced by the implications of her situation.

The truth came out in the end. But only after many grownups had made a wretched story about a child into a damning story about themselves.

I watched Republican men spitball their way to a post-Roe vision in South Carolina’s House. Here’s what I saw.

South Carolina’s House of Representatives is the latest legislative body to pass a near-total ban on abortion, following nauseating and weird floor debates that occurred on the House floor Tuesday and Wednesday. I wanted to see the sausage get made, and the process, it turns out, is even worse than you thought. Here is what I saw.

I watched members of the House meander to the dais to propose two dozen amendments to the original bill, all of which were designed to make the bill a little more or a little less draconian, but often more.

I watched one member suggest that social media could be used to spy on women suspected of seeking abortions. I watched one member propose prison time for women caught with abortion-causing drugs. I watched one claim that women lie “about getting raped or knocked up.” I watched many of these same members congratulate themselves for their humanity.

I watched a representative propose rape and incest exceptions specifically for underage girls. He gave, as a hypothetical example, a 12-year-old raped by her father. I watched as other representatives, who insisted they understood that rape was awful, declare that even a case like this would not be worth an exception.

“She had a choice,” an old man declared of this hypothetical pregnant 12-year-old girl, suggesting that she should have gone to a pharmacy and gotten Plan B after her father raped her, rather than need an abortion.

When asked how she would get to the pharmacy — would she ask her rapist father to drive her? — the representative replied that she could get there by ambulance. Did he think one would magically be waiting outside of her house after the rape?

You know what? I don’t think he really understands anything about rape at all.

I watched liberal Democrats vote with the most conservative Republicans in an unsuccessful attempt to make the bill too unpalatable for moderate Republicans to pass, hoping this strategy could tank the bill entirely.

“We got chess right now,” a Republican representative said, finally getting wise to what was happening. “And some people are playing checkers. And some of us don’t even know what game is going on.”

I watched a representative in a maroon blazer and plaid tie, a man who looked like a chorus member from a Christmas play about real estate agents, try to pass an amendment saying women who had abortions should be punished fully as murderers.

I watched as this particular amendment was voted down, and I felt immense relief.

Watching these bills being debated was like watching a conclave of grocers discuss whether customers, who used to be able to shop freely, should now be allowed to purchase a maximum of one raisin and half a macaroni noodle per week, or whether that would be too indulgent. How debasing it feels to beg for that macaroni noodle. How debasing, and how necessary. When the concept of a meal is off the table, when you know your choices are to accept scraps or starve, you fight for the scraps and try to forget what it once felt like to be full.

Watching these bills get made is useful to understanding exactly what world is being built in the absence of Roe v. Wade, and how. By looking at what ends up on the cutting room floor, we can see the deepest beliefs and desires and assumptions of state lawmakers to whom the Supreme Court has punted the ball. Not what laws they think they can pass with the right coalition of votes, but what laws some of them think would actually be just and moral. Sometimes you have to see it to believe it.

I watched a Republican propose an amendment that would allow for abortions in cases of “extreme fetal anomalies.” Not in cases of chromosomal aberrations like Down syndrome, he clarified, but in cases where the anomalies were incompatible with life. Cases in which a fetus is developing without a brain, he specified. Cases in which a woman is forced to carry a child she knows will die within hours if it draws a breath at all.

I watched as a fellow party member informed him that, no, such an exception should not be made because such fetal anomalies are often “misdiagnosed.”

(“That is preposterous and absurd,” said Cara Heuser, a spokesperson for the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and an expert in high-risk pregnancies, when I asked her later about whether the absence of a fetus’s brain might be misdiagnosed.)

I watched as a Republican begged for clarifying exceptions to embryos created via in vitro fertilization. It was an issue, he said, that was “very, very” personal to him. He didn’t give more details. His request for exceptions were denied.

I watched as a Democrat proposed that the bill be given to the people of South Carolina to vote on, the way that the people of Kansas were allowed to vote on their own abortion bill. Her proposal was tabled.

I watched as Democrats sought procedural loopholes to stall the bill; I watched as a female representative told her colleagues, from the podium, that her own two pregnancies had been life-threatening.

I watched as multiple Republicans lectured the Democrats for not getting in line and trying to make the bill “better.” And by “better,” they meant, something that would pass.

“This is not our bill,” a Democrat responded in a raised voice from the podium. “We’re not the ones trying to strip the rights and freedoms and equality and health-care choices away from the women of South Carolina.” If Republicans wanted the votes so badly, the Democrat said, “Get your own house in order.”

I watched, as the hours progressed, how the opponents of the bill accepted the defeat they always knew was an eventuality, using their time from the podium as a lamentation rather than as a pleading.

Just before the final vote, when the bill passed, 67-35, I watched Democrats lament what would happen to the women of South Carolina. What would happen to the families of South Carolina.

They lamented what would happen to the babies who would now be born to parents who hadn’t wanted them, in a state unprepared to support them, at the behest of politicians whose interest in them seemed to wane as soon as they exited the womb.

Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn opened their mouths and accidentally showed how complicated it is to define womanhood

Before we get to the fact that I spent my lunch hour emailing with an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary to find out whether “tallywhacker” was an officially recognized euphemism for “penis,” a brief recap of how we got here:

Last month Republican lawmakers went fishing for a “gotcha” at Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and thought they’d found one when Jackson declined a request from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) to “provide a definition for the word ‘woman.’” Jackson replied that she was “not a biologist.”

Of course, this wasn’t a biology test, it was a culture-war test, and conservatives were more than willing to inform Jackson she had failed. “The meaning of the word ‘woman’ is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?” Blackburn marveled, setting off waves of complaints about woke liberals and activist judges, and presenting Tucker Carlson with Christmas in March.

All that set the stage for this week, when several Republican lawmakers who had previously mocked Jackson’s answer set out to show just how simple and uncontroversial defining “woman” could be.

“I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) informed the audience at a GOP event after namechecking Jackson. “This is an easy answer. We’re a creation of God. We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex — we are the weaker sex — but we are our partner — we are our husband’s wife.”

Meanwhile Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), already in the news cycle for implying that cocaine and orgies were par for the course on Capitol Hill, decided to extend his moment in the sun by lecturing Nancy Pelosi from the House floor. “Science isn’t Burger King; you can’t just ‘have it your way,’” he said. “Take notes, Madame Speaker. I’m about to define what a woman is for you,” he said. “X chromosomes, no tallywhacker. It’s so simple.”

And this is where I got the poor OED editor involved, just to make sure I understood exactly what Cawthorn was talking about. She explained that “tallywhacker” is likely an Americanism, a variant of the word “tallywag,” which means “the testicles; the male genitals,” though Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a sea bass of the Atlantic Coast.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was asked by a HuffPost reporter to define “woman,” and replied, “Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman. Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.” When the reporter asked him whether a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman, he appeared uncertain: “Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?”

So, to review, here’s the GOP tip sheet: If you want to know whether someone is a woman, you should simply walk up to them and say, “Pardon, are you of Adam’s rib?” Alternatively, you could demand to see either a uterus or a “tallywhacker.”

These attempts at defining womanhood are not only weird (“weaker sex” is retrograde even by the standards of Republican gender politics), they are also unhelpful.

Let’s assume some basic things: that Marjorie Taylor Greene believes that all humans, not just women, are “creations of God”; and that Greene considered herself a woman long before she became her “husband’s wife.” Presumably she is not suggesting that a woman who is unmarried is in fact a man.

Greene is known for her vigorous workouts and her sculpted biceps. Such a strong woman would certainly acknowledge that “weaker sex” often depends on the category in question (mental, physical, emotional) and on the individual specimen. Does Greene believe she is inherently weaker, on any of these dimensions, than, say, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)? How about President Biden?

That leaves us with the “Adam’s rib” bit, an allusion to the biblical origin story of women. Which, fine. But I’m not sure how much closer this gets any of us to a definition of womanhood that we can actually use in The Year of Our Lord 2022. How is a women’s college or women’s athletic team supposed to incorporate the Adam’s rib test into their eligibility policies? Is there a swab for ancestral rib residue?

Again, this definition was the very best that Greene could come up with two full weeks after gloating on Twitter that Judge Jackson, “can’t define ‘woman’ so can’t say for sure whether her own two daughters are women.”

Cawthorn’s definition (XX chromosomes, tallywhacker-free) made me wonder what the congressman would make of the millions of women who have had Turner syndrome, a genetic disorder defined by a missing X chromosome. I wonder how he would determine the gender of an intersex individual who had reproductive characteristics of both sexes. Via a coin flip? A ruler?

As for Josh Hawley, I’ll say only that I can’t wait to inform my mother that since her uterus was removed when she was 35 via a medically necessary hysterectomy, she hasn’t been a woman in 26 years. Perhaps she will be consoled if I add that the senator sounded like he hadn’t really thought very hard about it: In the same exchange reported by HuffPost, he seemed to change his definition of “woman” to require not a uterus but a vagina: “I mean, a woman has a vagina, right?”

(Please note that by Hawley’s new definition he would be forced to accept trans women, post-gender affirming surgery, as women too.)

I’m not trying to pick at Greene, Cawthorn or Hawley for the fun of it. They had suggested that defining “woman” was simple, and I’m here to say that it’s not. Not when you take the question seriously, and look for answers outside your own immediate experiences and intuitions. Which is why when these lawmakers attempted to show how much smarter they were on gender science than a judge who takes things seriously for a living, what came out was gobbledygook.

These lawmakers are known for incendiary rhetoric. (Case in point, Greene is now accusing everyone who votes to confirm Jackson of supporting pedophiles.) But I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that I don’t actually think Greene, Hawley and Cawthorn were trying to be deliberately inflammatory when offering their definitions. I think they were trying their best and falling short. I think they were showing that providing a definition for “woman” isn’t a task that can be determined via checklist, no matter how hard the list maker tries to make it so.

I think what they were expressing was not a knowledge of biology, but rather a fear of living in a world they could not easily categorize based on what they already think they know. One in which women might not look or sound or behave exactly as they believe women should, and so the best way to define “woman” is to ask the woman in question. Does she live as a woman? Does she undergo the trials and tribulations and joys of a woman? Does she believe she is a woman?

“Provide a definition for the word ‘woman,’” Blackburn dared Biden’s Supreme Court nominee.

Ketanji Brown Jackson could not do so. And neither could the people who said it should be easy.