The people rash

Speaking of “people who need abortion rights,” I’m horrified to see that even Margaret Talbot is doing it. She does at least say “women” too, but there’s way too much peopleing.

Starting with a “women” passage:

Mississippi’s brief to uphold its law offers, among other rationales, the assertion that women’s lives are so much freer, more equal, and more replete with birth-control options now than they were in 1973, when Roe legalized the right to abortion nationwide, that we can let that right go by the wayside.

You know what that’s like? It’s like the Supreme Court saying, in the Shelby ruling, that voting rights are not an issue any more, so we can stop protecting them. It was RBG who said that’s like throwing away your umbrella because it’s not raining right now. Why are women’s lives freer and more equal? Partly because of abortion rights, duuuuuuuuuh.

Furthermore, even in an egalitarian society with reliable access to contraception and to child care for all, people will still want, and should be able to exercise, agency over the intimate, life-transforming decisions of when, or whether, to have children. Many people will still feel a need to end pregnancies for reasons—health risks and crises, destructive or failed relationships, personal economic hardship, the needs of other children—that have little to do with prevailing social conditions.

There it is (and not for the last time.) People. Why say people? It’s women. This burden falls on women.

The procedure that anti-­abortion lawyers want to portray as an unnecessary and outmoded privilege (and a shameful one) is a form of medical care that hundreds of thousands of people turn to each year, low-income people in particular. (Half of all abortions are obtained by people living below the federal poverty line.)

By women. Men never need abortions.

Not everybody can afford or obtain reliable birth control. And, ­despite Abbott’s absurd claim, there will always be people who become pregnant through coerced unprotected sex.

Women. It’s women that happens to. It doesn’t happen to men.

I’m wondering if an editor made her write it that way. She’s not your average trend-following dim bulb.

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