The Hostess With the Mostess?

 

Of the gross and galling things I've read this week, I guess the one that gives me the most amusement (FWIW) is this pretty accurate description of how men sometimes talk about female bodies, with this clip where a Republican politician refers to pregnant people as "host bodies" several times. See? The body is a host to the growing thing. An embryo or fetus. Which would make it a....parasite? 

I can't even joke about antiparasitic drugs like Ivermectin because pregnant humans and other mammals have been dosed with antiparasitics, and the results about harmful effects to pregnancies are kind of inconclusive. But pregnant people seeking abortions deliberately have dosed with any number of things deliberately, such as pennyroyal oil, with grave physical consequences. Because of the amounts used to make sure the job was done, because of the grave contraindications pregnancy and childbirth have had for living one's life in so many circumstances. The social and financial repercussions. The physical complications. 

Describing a pregnancy in the stark terms of "host bodies" neatly erases the whole woman-body/mind that experiences the pregnancy, while also inadvertently labelling the pregnancy as a "parasite"--a burden meant to be gotten rid of.  Like a pox, or a burden. Or a punishment for having sex that isn't "consequence-free". (Because the birth control failed--but that's next, I think.) 

I don't doubt though, that the people who passed this law and the people who support it are ignorant as hell about how it will affect women. I mean, look at this beardo:

M'kay--this guy does not seem to know how menstrual cycles work, which is not actually shocking even here in the 21st century, somehow.  But like, does he think a "Check Uterus" light comes on when a woman catches pregnant and they're just ignoring it for the next 6,000 miles or what? 

No, a whore is when you don't know that your own spiritual Daddy is Rush Limbaugh, who is burning like Satan's own cigar in infamy, because a comedy-whore can have many papas, but any sexually active woman only has her own sort of unreliable-narrator menstrual cycle to go on, (I mean what is one to do--always be peeing on a stick?) and even his own Momma might not have known she was having him until her waistband got tight. And for some wild reason she just went with it, the lucky bastard. (I know--he got cancelled by a "woke mob" of people who do weird shit like "know how bodies work" when he was just trying to "Tell Jokes" by "Calling women whores for getting pregnant because that's what they can do", but maybe I'm just in a whole punch-down mood for reasons like PMS which just gives me the emotional crazies, y'know? I mean, who even knows enough about women-brains to say I'm wrong?)

But there's a lot of bad science and ignorance being wielded by people who actually aren't just Twitter denizens--like take how the whole heartbeat ignorance has metastasized.  The embryo of six weeks hasn't a heartbeat in the sense of being viable and individual. 

(And there is a whole lot else about the ignorance in the pro-life ecosystem--the disinfo, which is very planned, and the weird toilet-bowl non-facts like whether abortions cause breast cancer  that never really flush down. The pro-life movement is based on lies. Women-hating lies.)

Some people are inclined to respect the prolife movement because of their sincere religious beliefs. After watching people crying and carrying on and actually being performatively abusive about being antimask and antivax, you know what? I decline to call any ideology sincere if it relies on "Me and my imaginary friend say so regardless of your so-called science" and start to get violent and punitive toward actual humans about it.  This is just ignorance, and ignorance can only be corrected with a dose of hard truths. 

Hear it and jeer it. They might not have ever been told, but if you have the mouth, let them know. I am a human woman, not some host, except to a lot of thoughts and feelings about why my fertility does not define me. And I don't want other woman-bodied people to be defined by anything they carry but their personal potential.