Gender Apartheird and the Problem of Pregnancy

In my feature article for Salvo 23, I have revisited the theme of the first article I ever wrote for Salvo, namely gender neutrality.

Titled, 'Unmaking a Difference: is Gender Neutrality the New Stereotype?' my article explores some of the lengths to which the gender neutralizers are going to try to eliminate gender from our society.

In the article I point out that for all the lip service being given to androgyny and gender-neutrality, there remains one natural, final barrier to reaching the gender-free utopia: pregnancy. The fact of pregnancy constantly reminds us of the one thing that the new social architects would like us to forget: that men and women are inescapably different, that men and women have different lived experiences. 

The gender-neutralizers are not unaware of the problem that pregnancy poses. In April 2009, the British newspaper the Telegraph ran an article titled, "Telling pregnant women not to drink is 'sexist.'" The story cited medical legal expert Dr. Colin Gavaghan, who called "singling out one sex for particular monitoring and lecturing from healthcare professionals" a "straightforward sexist policy." 

 

Well, let's face it: when it comes to having a responsible pregnancy, women are singled out. Dr. Gavaghan seems unwilling to admit that only women are able to become pregnant. However "equal" our society strives to be, assistance for pregnancy will always necessarily be targeted towards the female sex. 

Or will it?

 

In 2006 the British Department of Health published a new edition of its Pregnancy Book, and just so men won't feel left out, it has a chapter especially for them, which says, among other things, that men can experience nausea as a symptom of pregnancy, too. And a 2010 report in The Daily Mail outlined efforts by the UK government "to get fathers more involved in their child's upbringing from before birth and beyond." These measures include giving fathers government-funded lessons on the benefits of breastfeeding.

But efforts like these will never satisfy the aspirations of the more extreme gender neutralizers. For them, the only way to truly solve the problem of "gender apartheid" is to do away with pregnancy altogether. In January 2012, LifeSiteNews quoted from an article Dr. Anna Smajdor had recently written for the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. Dr. Smajdor argued that in order for men and women to be equal, all women must stop becoming pregnant and hand their reproductive potential over to science and technology. "Pregnancy is a condition that causes pain and suffering, and that affects only women," Dr. Smajdor said, so "women are disadvantaged." 

LifeSiteNews journalist Peter Baklinski commented,

to be a woman, for Smajdor, simply means to become biologically more like a man. To do this, a woman's innate and natural potential to procreate, nurture, and bear a new human life must be stripped away and handed over to science and technology. Only when all human beings do not bear children will a genuine equality be more closely approached, she proposes.

To read more about this, click on the following link:

'Unmaking a Difference  Is Gender Neutrality the New Stereotype?'

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