The Times has noticed the ACLU’s determination to erase women from abortion rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union, whose advocacy on reproductive rights is of more than a half-century vintage, recently tweeted its alarm about the precarious state of legal abortion:

“Abortion bans disproportionately harm: Black Indigenous and other people of color. The L.G.B.T.Q. community. Immigrants. Young people. Those working to make ends meet. People with disabilities. Protecting abortion access is an urgent matter of racial and economic justice.”

But nothing to do with women. It’s not just the ACLU, the Times correctly points out.

From Planned Parenthood to NARAL Pro-Choice America to the American Medical Association to city and state health departments and younger activists, the word “women” has in a matter of a few years appeared far less in talk of abortion and pregnancy.

That’s a clumsy sentence. Over the past few years the word has been disappearing.

This speed of change is evident: In 2020, NARAL issued a guide to activists on abortion that stressed they should talk about a “woman’s choice.” Two years later, the same guide emphasized the need for “gender-neutral language.”

And many women objected and continue to object, and they all ignore us.

This reflects a desire by medical professionals to find a language that does not exclude and gives comfort to those who give birth and identify as nonbinary or transgender. No agency appears to collect data on transgender and nonbinary pregnancies, but Australia has reported that about 0.1 percent of all births involve transgender men.

And for that tiny number we have to erase women and women’s rights from the fight for abortion, which is kind of like taking on the Nazis with a few slingshots.

For those who fight in the trenches of reproductive politics, the surprise is that a turn to gender-neutral language surprises. Louise Melling, a deputy legal director for the A.C.L.U., noted that not long ago male pronouns and terms such as “mankind” were considered sufficient to cover all women. Language is a powerful instrument, she said, and helps to determine political consciousness.

Oh jesus fucking christ. Yes, exactly, not long ago male everything was used for everything, and we’ve only had about five minutes of people trying to remember to include women now and then and suddenly NO, STOP, we have to stop mentioning women ever.

“Language evolves and it can exclude or it can include,” Ms. Melling noted in an interview. “It’s really important to me that we think about pregnant people. It’s the truth: Not only women give birth, not only women seek abortion.”

On the contrary, that is not the truth, it is the opposite of the truth.

NARAL punctuated this point in a tweet last year defending its use of “birthing people”: “We use gender neutral language when talking about pregnancy, because it’s not just cis-gender women that can get pregnant and give birth.”

Yes it is. That’s exactly who it is. It is only women who can get pregnant and give birth. That includes butch women. It doesn’t matter how high on the butchOmeter they register, they are still women. Men cannot get pregnant or give birth.