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The WaPo has an agenda and it’s different from the CDC’s

I’ll admit, the flare-up over this WaPo article chastising women for not acting like we’re in a constant state of pregnancy is causing me to bang my head against the wall. I noted, strongly I thought, yesterday that the article is very misleading and doesn’t describe the report at all. You can read the report here.  There are two main things that are very important to keep in mind during all this:



  • The CDC did not suggest that the only reason to keep women healthy is for our duty to produce good soliders for the Fatherland.

  • However, the WaPo article basically did say that.

So it’s not like there’s a real disagreement here.  Ezra is right that the CDC article is actually something that fits into the progressive agenda nicely, even though of course if it were scientifically sound and against us, you have to bend to evidence. It’s not just that the report lays the blame on society for not getting poor women in front of a doctor more often that fits our agenda, either. The report firmly states that it’s in a woman’s best interests to plan her pregnancies to fit her life goals.

All that said, the fury in the feminist blogosphere is completely understandable.  There is no reason to feel like this is a great opportunity to condescendingly tell the little womb-bearers that we shouldn’t be offended when someone dehumanizes us. The WaPo article was smugly misogynist when it recommended that women’s behavior be constrained and that all women should view themselves primarily as incubators. Telling women to suck it up and lay at home pretending we’re pregnant while men go out for drinks or even sushi lest we damage the only thing that really matters about us isn’t “sensible” advice. It’s cruel and it fits into a long tradition of using theoretical pregnancies as an excuse to discriminate against women officially and to subtly undermine our self-esteem. For instance, while it probably sailed right by a lot of the audience of the WaPo article, the never-clean-a-catbox suggestion was echoing nasty stereotypes about women who have pet cats, particularly how owning cats is held against single women as a symbol that they’re insufficiently dedicated to their mission to get with husband and child ASAP.

And for those who are fixing to smugly say that feminists should have read the report before getting angry, think about what you’re saying. It’s sad that we’ve come to a point where even a medical article has to be assumed to be 90% propaganda, 10% information. Instead of clucking and condescending, get mad! The WaPo won’t do their damn jobs right.

The CDC, as Ezra points out, is pretty mundane in its political agenda. The CDC mostly has a list of diseases and tries to collect research on prevention/treatment and boil it down into recommendations for doctors and the public. Recommendations are targeted, of course. This report was about putting together research and recommending ways for doctors and educators help women get pregnant the right way as opposed to the all-too-common “oops I was drunk” way. It seems to me that these recommendations, if implemented, would help shove society in a direction where we view pregnancy as something rightfully planned and controlled by women instead of the current, anti-feminist view that pregnancy is just a manifestation of women’s role as passive vehicles.

The subtle little catbox dig in the article and the implication--that women are getting scandalously out of control with their crazy notions that they have a right to exist for themselves--shows to me how the WaPo has an agenda and that agenda is very different from the CDC’s agenda. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The NY Times specializes in pushing articles about how it would just be so nice if women quit having career ambitions and stayed at home, but the WaPo prefers to sex up their stories a little and write about how it would be so much nicer if women would quit thinking they deserved a little fun and pleasure, and leave those things up to the men. Mildly different. But certainly it’s fitting that the editorial staff that feels that an evidence-less claim that college women who actually like sex are causing an impotence epidemic on campuses around the nation might be inclined to favor spinning otherwise mundane medical recommendations so it looks like it’s just all the more evidence that the world will fall apart if women in it don’t give up on enjoying life.

In other words, the alarming part of this entire debacle is that the WaPo thinks it’s necessary to put a fiercely anti-woman spin on an article that’s supposed to be about women’s health issues. The real story is that the CDC released a report that indicated that we need more health care for women and more education about the importance of planning your reproductive life. The WaPo is burying a story that could be used as more evidence by progressives to bolster our pro-universal health care, pro-choice agenda.

Posted by on 05/18 at 06:52 AM

  1. In a comment thread on one of my posts about abortion, I actually had a commenter who insisted that it was completely arbitrary and irrational to think of the fetus/baby differently based on a “change in location”—i.e., the shift from being in the womb to being in the outside world.  It seemed like a very graphic illustration of the way that the so-called “culture of life” totally ignores women and their needs.  And now, of course, we have the “liberal media” helping women to think of themselves primarily as a hospitable environment for fetuses.

    Posted by Adam Kotsko  on  05/18  at  11:55 AM

  2. Did the study saying preemies often have older fathers (possibly because they accumulate mutations and/or toxins) get similar play?  Just askin’.

    Posted by Caro  on  05/18  at  01:18 PM

  3. What with the current dizzying pace of advancement in our understanding of the human genome, retroviral genetic surgery and macrosurgical techniques, and nanotechnology, it is likely just a matter of time until gender-reassignment medics will be able to install fully functioning female reproductive systems in male-born humans who desire them. Could be next decade, could be two hundred years from now. But the day is probably coming.

    So if we apply the same logic antiabortionists use when discussing the potential future viability of second-trimester fetuses — “ten years from now they could be viable!” — we are forced to conclude that all men are potentially pre-pregnant as well.

    Which means that anything we do now to reduce the fertiliciousness of our potential future female reproductive systems is a Bad Thing. So eating high on the food chain, with its attendant greater intake of bioaccumulative toxic chemicals and radioisotopes, should be officially discouraged by the gummint.

    And few animals commonly eaten by men are higher on the food chain than game fish.

    Ban bass fishing now! Think of the children!

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  05/18  at  01:57 PM

  4. this is beginning to sound so later 40’s early 50’s to me.  Get the damn women out of the workplace, into nice neat nuclear family cubicle requiring the people to keep purchasing lots and lots and lots of consumer goods, and hopefully those goods will become ever more unreliable and cheaper and nearly instantly obsolete, while we insist that only in nuclear family units (not those multi-generational extended ones where seniors help with grandchildren--i mean what’s wrong with you?) will our great nation’s future continue to be fully realized. 

    Yep, that seems to be where we are again.  Afterall, day-care has ruined this country, by allowing women to compete with men for men’s jobs, damn it all.  As the captcha word suggests:  “same” as it ever was.

    Posted by  on  05/18  at  02:45 PM

  5. You know what’s highest on the food chain? Man!

    Posted by Hattie  on  05/18  at  03:36 PM

  6. Amanda - thanks for doing such a great job unpacking that nasty WaPo article. Also, I loved your post on Pandagon on the twisted linking of sexually empowered women to college male flaccidity.  I am continually amazed (although I guess I shouldn’t be) at how far society will go to contort just about anything into an anti-feminist message.

    Chris Clarke - I have believed since I was a teenager that the conditions for women regarding pregnancy and childbirth will only improve once men start having babies as well.  Suddenly, we’ll have greatly improved policies around pregnancy leave, more childcare options (both availability and affordability), and more freedom of choice for women in how and where they want to give birth.  But then the cynic (realist?) takes over, and I think, no, women will continue to get screwed, as always. Men will get the “special” treatment because it will be argued that pregnancy and delivery are “harder” on them.  You watch.

    And I love your idea about potentially pre-pregnant men. Yes, let’s propose taking away away all their favorite food and drink goodies and see how far we get!

    Posted by  on  05/18  at  05:00 PM

  7. Well, yeah. Thanks.

    Posted by iamcoyote  on  05/18  at  10:28 PM

  8. Women go ‘missing’ by the millions
    Ayaan Hirsi Ali Tribune Media Services International
    SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 2006 - AMSTERDAM

    As I was preparing for this article, I asked a friend who is Jewish if it was appropriate to use the term “holocaust” to portray the worldwide violence against women. He was startled. But when I read him the figures in a 2004 policy paper published by the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, he said yes, without hesitation.

    One United Nations estimate says from 113 million to 200 million women around the world are demographically “missing.” Every year, from 1.5 million to 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect.

    Posted by  on  05/19  at  04:14 PM

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