Misogyny’s Face Revealed
By: Jason Park
Tags: Women, Nonfiction, Books, Misogyny, Reading

Kate Manne’s Entitled is fantastic, and it needs to be read widely. However, I feel that in the throes of writing about great progressive values, she sometimes begins speaking only to a progressive audience. She lost me, for instance, in her chapter on abortion. First, she describes the right to an abortion as “constitutionally protected”, which is not accepted as fact for most non-progressive Americans. Some, like me, feel strongly that the constitution does not reflect such a right and feel that the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision was extremely misguided on that front. But there is much more, if only in this passage:

The idea of a fetal heartbeat is clearly designed to tug on, well, the heartstrings. But calling it a heartbeat at six or eight weeks of someone’s pregnancy (dating from the first day of their last menstrual period) is very much a misnomer. At this stage, there is no heartbeat — not least because there is no heart (nor a brain, nor a face). There is no fetus, even: an embryo makes that transition at around week nine or ten. At six weeks of pregnancy, the embryo is approximately the size of a green pea. On an ultrasound, a pulsing of cells that are specializing to become cardiac may or may not be detectable. In some pregnancies, such activity will not be detected until significantly later.

That’s a face.

I’ll start with the truth here: she is right that it is not called a fetus until week nine or ten. Calling it by another name does nothing to further her argument. Now the falsehoods. The neural tube closes at 6 or 7 weeks, marking the separation of the brain from the spinal cord. The face develops around week 7. Manne zeroes in on “six or eight weeks” because these are usually the weeks after which “heartbeat bills” are designed to ban abortions. The heart begins to form around six weeks, and that is the first week at which a heartbeat can be detected, which is why some “heartbeat bills” are set to ban abortions after that week. The thinking is that the possibility of a heartbeat means there is human life, but that line of thinking is not represented in Manne’s point of view.

More than that, this view (of a heartbeat at six or eight weeks meaning essentially nothing) is not supported by the medical profession, at least in practice. Fetal heartbeats are used by medical professionals to make important medical decisions. I know this from experience.

In 2016, my wife was pregnant for the second time. When she was seven weeks pregnant, we went into the doctor and heard a heartbeat for the first time. (Manne is right, you can’t always detect a heartbeat this early.) A week later, we left Texas on vacation to Michigan. While there, my wife ran a 103-degree fever, and her doctor back in Texas said to go into the ER. When we get there, they check on the baby and… they can’t find a heartbeat. They try a couple of times, but they then tell us the baby has no heartbeat and my wife is going to miscarry. The baby had died. We were crushed. The next two days were almost unbearable, but my wife’s doctor asks us if we can come back to Texas because she wants to do a checkup on my wife. We fly back to Texas two days after the terrible news, and we go in to get a second ultrasound from her doctor. “There’s your heartbeat… and there’s the baby!” The ultrasound technician couldn’t believe it either. Our baby was still there, heartbeat and all, at 8 weeks even though the other doctors had told us that there was no heartbeat and no hope. My son Paxton is 3 now.

If Paxton’s heartbeat was a “misnomer”, if it can’t be reliably detected at 6 or 8 weeks, if it’s essentially meaningless, then why do doctors tell you to prepare for a miscarriage, even offer a D&C, if they can’t find a heartbeat? Because know a heartbeat is a life. Those doctors were wrong, but not in the way Manne purports they were. They were wrong because they saw no life when there was life.

I know my story doesn’t prove Kate Manne wrong, and there are other people and even doctors and scientists that share her opinion. What we have is a disagreement about where human life begins, and that is not reflected in her writing. She claims to have all the facts on her side when a whole lot of people, including many medical professionals, disagree with those facts. She is speaking to a progressive audience with progressive talking points, not willing to see the larger picture. This is especially true in one more passage:

It’s one thing for someone who might get pregnant to oppose abortion on a personal level — to be disinclined to have one herself, or even to feel that it would be wrong for anyone in such a position to do so, on the basis of religious views she doesn’t expect everyone to share, say. It’s another thing entirely to think — especially as someone who cannot get pregnant, as a cisgender man — that anyone who becomes pregnant should be forced to bear the pregnancy to term, using the coercive power of the state, regardless of their age, beliefs, life circumstances, the traumatic manner of their becoming pregnant, or the devastating outcomes if they are not allowed to end it. The former is a reasonable manifestation of individual differences; the latter is a deeply draconian, deeply troubling attitude. Remember, the state doesn’t regulate certain behaviors that most people think are immoral — lying to and cheating on one’s partner, say — or behaviors that some people think are tantamount to murder — eating meat, for example. The social costs of coercion here seem to radically outweigh those of the possibility that some people will choose to do things that others believe they should not do, given the kinds of freedom to which they are entitled.

This sounds reasonable, except when you realize that the state does regulate certain behaviors, such as enslaving other human beings, that degrade human life. Substitute abortion for slavery in that argument and it falls apart. So the question when it comes to abortion is not “Is this a freedom to which I am entitled?”. It’s “Is this a human life?”. I am OK that Manne does not agree with me on the answer to that question, and it wouldn’t affect my opinion of her book if she were honest about that, but I would like to know that she sees where the disconnect lies. Talking to your side won’t bridge that divide.

(If I have misrepresented Manne’s argument in any way, I am open to her or someone else’s feedback on that matter.)