Uterus Exceptionalism (Part II)

Poor “Pro-life” Argument #4

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Uterus Exceptionalism (Part II)

Poor “Pro-life” Argument #4

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Since I left the so-called “pro-life” movement, I've spent considerable time engaged in self-reflection, examining my thoughts, desires, assumptions, biases, and motivations from my time as an “pro-lifer.” I have come to understand that anti-choicers have a deep, often unconscious, need to feel like they are the “good guys,” like they are compassionate do-gooders.¹

Part of this stems from antis’ overwhelming conservatism, which drives them to support certain policies that, because of the nature of these policies, inevitably result in antis facing criticism.²

Instead of striving for progress or lifting up the poor, the marginalized, disabled, and disenfranchised; instead of securing human rights and dignity or ensuring liberty and justice for all; and instead of searching for better solutions to the problems we face or endeavoring to safeguard our democratic republic, many of the policies that the vast majority of antis support merely protect the status quo; buttress a social, economic, and health hierarchy; are aimed at forcing everyone to live by the beliefs of a few, while punishing non-conformity; limit opportunity; perpetuate and bolster biases and discrimination; and guarantee inequality, injustice, disenfranchisement, and violations of human rights and dignity.

Despite their oft tough and self-assured persona, most antis are actually quite sensitive to and bothered by criticism. The leaders of the movement are endlessly busy formulating new arguments that are responsive to criticisms, arguments that soothe antis’ insecurities and allow antis to maintain their sense of superiority, their need to be the “good guys.”³

Antis do care about the public's perception of them.

As I noted in Part I, many opponents of reproductive health, rights, and justice, who adhere to Fetal Personhood ideology, are slowly starting to catch on to the reality that, despite their opportunistic appeals to the lofty liberal ideals of justice, rights, and equality, Fetal Personhood ideology is built on the very opposite of those ideals. It requires injustice, the erasure of rights, and inequality.

This makes them look like the “bad guys” — not the “good guys.” And they're very aware of this.

Hence, antis have developed a theory of uterus exceptionalism.

Under uterus exceptionalism, antis attempt to retain a position within the moral arc of society by (1) acknowledging that no legal person can use or be inside of another person without consent - thus serving their need to feel like they aren't the “bad guys” standing against equality, rights, justice, and liberty - while (2) paradoxically excluding the uterus, and only the uterus, from this broad principle of bodily self-ownership and inviolability.

Antis attempt to do this in several ways:

• By insisting the uterus is not actually like the rest if the human body or its parts.

• By insisting the uterus only exists for others’ use.

• By insisting a person’s uterus doesn't actually belong to that person.

• By reducing the use of one person's body by another during pregnancy to the mere occupation of a single organ.

Uterus exceptionalism arguments are grounded in several fallacies. In Part I, we discussed two of those fallacies: (1) that the only function of the uterus is to reproduce; and (2) that a person’s uterus doesn't actually belong to them.

In today's post, Part II of this two-part series, we will examine two other fallacies of uterus exceptionalism:

1. framing pregnancy as a single-organ event.; and

2. the denial of the self-other distinction.

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Pregnancy Involves the Whole Body

Anti-choice activist Lila Rose, the founder and leader of the extremist anti-reproductive-rights group Live Action, recently interviewed Stephanie Gray Connors. Like Rose, Connors is a Catholic opponent of sexual and reproductive health and human rights (*SRHR). In her 2024 book, My Body for You: A Pro-Life Message for a Post-Roe World (free access here), Connors writes that, should a pregnant person need a “direct abortion” to save their life, “she must reject that path and instead accept early death” (emphasis added).⁴

In anti-SRHR circles, Stephanie Gray Connors is seen as an expert apologist. Hence, in the interview, Rose asked Connors how anti-choicers should respond to various arguments made by supporters of reproductive health, rights, and justice.

When discussing the fact that no person has a right to use the body of another person as life support (starting at 00:15:18), Connors invoked uterus exceptionalism. She said:

“What is the nature and purpose of the uterus? And the nature and purpose of the uterus is that it is an organ in my body different from all my other body parts in that it exists more for my offspring than it does for me… And so therefore you can say that the offspring of you have a right to your uterus…”

(Note: We already discussed several of the fallacies that are observable in Connors’ statement in Part I.)

What is important to notice here is that Connors reduced the use of the pregnant body by the fetus during pregnancy down to a single organ: the uterus. Hyper-focusing on the uterus can be an indication of physiological ignorance or it can be a reflection of a person’s attitudinal devaluation of the pregnant individual. After all, opponents of reproductive health, rights, and justice frequently take issue with statements that affirm the full personhood of the human being who is pregnant (just look at how apoplectic they become when you remind them that women are people, too).

It can also be a rhetorical sleight of hand intended to direct attention away from the whole pregnant person and towards a single body part as a means of minimizing the physiological labor of gestation and the all encompassing co-optation of the pregnant body by the fetus.

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Pregnancy is a physiological state, a health condition.⁵⁶ It is also a biological war over resources and a period of genetic conflict.⁷⁸⁹¹⁰ Paternal genes encourage fetal growth and demand greater resource acquisition from the pregnant person, while maternal genes try to conserve the pregnant person’s resources to protect her health.¹¹¹²

The fetus uses, draws resources from, and effects the entirety of the maternal body, including:

• the haematological and cardiovascular systems;

• the respiratory and urinary systems;

• the musculoskeletal system and the skin;

• the digestive, lymphatic and immune systems;

• the endocrine, nervous and reproductive systems.

“Pregnancy acts as an ongoing stress test that taxes body systems and generates unique health risks. It changes how the heart, lungs, and kidneys function. It also alters the immune system, and changes metabolism through effects on various organs. It increases blood flow throughout the body.”¹³ And it effects women's long-term health.¹⁴

Pregnancy cannot be reduced to a single organ, and the fetus's use of the pregnant person’s body extends far beyond the muscular wall of the uterus. Uterus exceptionalism arguments are flailing attempts to reduce the irreducible, minimize pregnancy, and sideline the subjectivity of pregnant people.

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The Self-Other Distinction

When you were just a baby, you began to develop a sense of self, your identity.

Within just a few hours of your birth, you were able to tell if the hand caressing your cheek belonged to you or to someone else.¹⁵ Still, in the first few months of your life, you saw yourself as a part of your primary caregiver, perhaps your mother.¹⁶ Then, when you were around five months old, you started to realize that you and your caregiver are two separate individuals.¹⁷ This was an important milestone in the development of your concept of self,¹⁸ “a pre-reflective, ‘tactile, auditory, and kinesthetic…bodily self.’”¹⁹

Over the next months, you began to understand yourself as a material object.²⁰ You recognized your name and, when prompted, you could identify one or two of your own body parts.²¹ (You recognized, “This body is mine, or part of me.”)

When you were around 18 months old, you first recognized yourself in the mirror, marking a major milestone in the development of reflective self-awareness —“the realization that one’s body, mind, and activities are distinct from those of other people.”²²

[Note: The most common technique used in devopmental psychology to assess self-awareness in early childhood is known as the “Rouge Test.”²³ “The rouge test works by applying a dot of rouge (colored makeup) on an [child's] face and then placing [that child] in front of the mirror.”²⁴ If the child investigates the dot on their nose by directly touching it - that is, touching their actual nose, not the mirror reflection of it - then the child has “achieved self-awareness.”²⁵ It’s cute to watch: see the video below.]

By age two, you had developed a “working knowledge of the size and shape of [your] own body,” and its physical parameters.²⁶ “[B]y 30 months [you were] beginning to represent how body parts are spatially arranged for both [your] own and others’ bodies.”²⁷

From the time you were an infant until today, you've continued to develop a sense of self, an identity, often incorporating new facets of self over time through your embodied interactions with the world and with others. But at the core of your identity, of who you are, is reflective self-awareness —“the realization that one’s body, mind, and activities are distinct from those of other people.”²⁸

Uterus exceptionalism arguments deny this self-other distinction.

Uterus exceptionalism arguments — especially those which categorically assign possession of one person's internal organ to another person — deny the self-other distinction at the core of our identities as self-aware, embodied, material beings with physical parameters.

Uterus exceptionalism arguments — especially those which appropriate women's organs for others’ use — “divide[] women from their wombs and use[] their wombs for a purpose unrelated to women's own aspirations,” redefining the physical boundaries of their bodies in the process.²⁹

Uterus exceptionalism arguments — especially those which disposess women of their uteruses — seek to rhetorically separate a single organ from a whole person, turning individuals into fragmented objects.

In other words, such arguments are designed to turn individuals into dividuals.

Rhetorically alienating a whole person from their internal organs, redefining their physical parameters, denies them full personhood. It assigns them membership in a subclass - dividuals - who, by virtue of merely being born with uteruses, are “uniquely subject to the disintegration and loss of selfhood.”³⁰ Being born with that particular organ thus becomes a status disability imposed by society - not biology.

But people aren't dividuals.

We are whole, individual human beings, distinct from others.

Uterus exceptionalism arguments that attempt to rhetorically divide the individual deny this very basic reality that sits at the core of our identities as whole persons - as self-aware, embodied, individual persons with physical parameters.

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No one forfeits their full personhood upon becoming pregnant. Yet, as this post has shown, opponents of reproductive healthcare, rights, and justice turn to uterus exceptionalism arguments when confronted with statements affirming pregnant people’s full personhood and their rights to bodily integrity and equal treatment under the law. These arguments attempt to reduce the irreducible and divide the individual. Far from countering the criticisms of the anti-choice movement and its Fetal Personhood ideology, uterus exceptionalism arguments validate critics’ observations.

Truth be told, when your movement and your ideology are built upon and sustained by inequality, injustice, oppression, and the arbitrary denial of healthcare, appeals to uterus exceptionalism aren't going to get you very far.

1. Historian Jennifer Holland writes:

The socially conservative “activists who repurposed the language of civil rights [in the 1960s] in [the anti-abortion] movement were almost all white. They were drawn from similar demographics as other mid- to late-twentieth-century conservatives. But white conservatives of the late 1960s and 1970s faced new challenges. When in the 1970s Americans began to recast the civil rights movement as righteous, not riotous, southerners who resisted desegregation were left outside of history's moral arc. This transformation had repercussions beyond the South; it had the potential to damage the Republican Party of Barry Goldwater and states' rights, even in the minds of an increasing number of white Americans. The embrace of rights discourse was partially a response to the moral rupture of massive resistance. White conservatives had to rethink the moral and ideological basis of whiteness in the aftermath of a civil rights movement which made the defense of segregation and white supremacy publicly untenable.

“Anti-abortion activists offered one way out of this conundrum by building a civil rights movement for fetuses. They constructed a narrative in which white elites-from doctors to university professors, mainstream Democrats to radical feminists-were indoctrinating the American populace, leading them away from basic truths about humanity, gender, and life. Additionally, they suggested that many people of color—a group that activists fit into the old category of "the undeserving poor"-were destabilizing society from below. Because of the machinations of these two groups, abortion had become and stayed legal. Activists argued abortion threatened not just fetal lives but also Christianity, womanhood, the haven of childhood, and the “traditional family." When white activists tied their own identities to fetal victimhood, white conservatives too became victims. Regular white Americans, meanwhile, became the "moral middle" under threat from both the top and the bottom.

“Through this civil rights movement for fetuses, regular white people could be both the victims of modernity and potential saviors. When social conservatives borrowed the new social currency of civil rights and put it to socially conservative ends, white religious people-southerners, northerners, and westerners alike—were able to represent themselves as abolitionists, not segregationists. This was no small task, not least because anti-abortion activists usually figured fetal victims as white. But they often implied they would rescue people of color as well. In this way people of color, especially black people, were implicated in the pro-life movement, as one-dimensional victims of a liberal, feminist, or “anti-life" society in need of a white conservative savior. They came on stage, so to speak, largely to prove the morality of the white protagonist.

“These proliferating victimhoods redeemed the Right at the expense of those from whom white conservative activists borrowed. Victimhood was always a hierarchy in the pro-life worldview, with the innocent fetus sitting at its apex. All others were tarnished by their potential corruption by liberal forces or by the fact that they were born. Born humans, after all, had a certain amount of personal responsibility for their circumstances in a way that fetuses could not have. Fetuses, and only fetuses, could be truly innocent. In a post-civil-rights era, white social conservatives asked that people of color and other marginalized groups fall into line with a civil rights movement for white people. This was one reason white anti-abortion activists never strayed into "other" civil rights issues; it was also why people of color, even conservative religious ones, rarely strayed into anti-abortion activism.

“The pro-life rhetoric of fetal civil rights was supposed to distract from another group who could make a claim to "rights”: women. The anti-abortion movement worked hard to hide the abortion-seeking woman, her civil rights, and her reasons for abortion.” (Emphasis added)

Holland, J. L. (2020). Introduction . In Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (p. 17-18). essay, University of California Press .

2. See footnote 1

3. See footnote 1

4. Stephanie Gray Connors, My Body for you. (2024). (SCRIBD, pdf, at 114). Retrieved at https://www.scribd.com/document/880093843/My-Body-for-You-a-Pro-Life-Message-for-a-Post-Roe-World-Stephanie-Gray-Connors-Z-Library

5. Smajdor, A., & Räsänen, J. (2025, January 1). Is pregnancy a disease? A normative approach. Journal of Medical Ethics. https://jme.bmj.com/content/51/1/37

6. Neill, S., & Shainker, S. (2023, January 25). Is pregnancy safe for everyone?. Harvard Health. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-pregnancy-safe-for-everyone-202301252881

7. Aeonmag. (2020, February 4). In the tug-of-war between mother and baby, the placenta is a life-giving referee: Aeon Videos. Aeon. https://aeon.co/videos/in-the-tug-of-war-between-mother-and-baby-the-placenta-is-a-life-giving-referee

8. Unborn babies use “greedy” gene from dads to “remote-control” mums into feeding them extra food. University of Cambridge. (2023, July 11). https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/unborn-babies-use-greedy-gene-from-dads-to-remote-control-mums-into-feeding-them-extra-food#:~:text=Unborn%20babies%20use%20%27greedy%27%20gene,to%20support%20the%20developing%20fetus.

9. Ayers, J. D. (2022, December 12). Pregnancy is a genetic battlefield – how conflicts of interest pit mom’s and dad’s genes against each other. Boise State News. https://www.boisestate.edu/news/2022/12/07/pregnancy-is-a-genetic-battlefield-how-conflicts-of-interest-pit-moms-and-dads-genes-against-each-other/#:~:text=Both%20sides%20are%20trying%20to,to%20harm%20the%20mother%27s%20health.

10. “battle of the Sexes” begins in womb as father and mother’s genes tussle over nutrition. University of Cambridge. (2021, December 27). https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/battle-of-the-sexes-begins-in-womb-as-father-and-mothers-genes-tussle-over-nutrition#:~:text=But%20maternally%2Dexpressed%20genes%20act,the%20level%20of%20the%20genome.%E2%80%9D

11. Ayers, J. D. (2022, December 12). Pregnancy is a genetic battlefield – how conflicts of interest pit mom’s and dad’s genes against each other. Boise State News. https://www.boisestate.edu/news/2022/12/07/pregnancy-is-a-genetic-battlefield-how-conflicts-of-interest-pit-moms-and-dads-genes-against-each-other/#:~:text=Both%20sides%20are%20trying%20to,to%20harm%20the%20mother%27s%20health.

12. “battle of the Sexes” begins in womb as father and mother’s genes tussle over nutrition. University of Cambridge. (2021, December 27). https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/battle-of-the-sexes-begins-in-womb-as-father-and-mothers-genes-tussle-over-nutrition#:~:text=But%20maternally%2Dexpressed%20genes%20act,the%20level%20of%20the%20genome.%E2%80%9D

13. Neill, S., & Shainker, S. (2023, January 25). Is pregnancy safe for everyone?. Harvard Health. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-pregnancy-safe-for-everyone-202301252881

14. How pregnancy affects a lifetime of Health. American Physiological Society . (2025). https://www.physiology.org/publications/news/the-physiologist-magazine/2024/november/how-pregnancy-affects-a-lifetime-of-health?SSO=Y

15. Brownell, C. A., Nichols, S. R., Svetlova, M., Zerwas, S., & Ramani, G. (2010). The head bone's connected to the neck bone: when do toddlers represent their own body topography?. Child development, 81(3), 797–810. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01434.x

16. Domain 1: Self-concept. Illinois Early Learning Project. (2025, May 14). https://illinoisearlylearning.org/ielg/self-concept/

17. Domain 1: Self-concept. Illinois Early Learning Project. (2025, May 14). https://illinoisearlylearning.org/ielg/self-concept/

18. Domain 1: Self-concept. Illinois Early Learning Project. (2025, May 14). https://illinoisearlylearning.org/ielg/self-concept/

19. Brownell, C. A., Nichols, S. R., Svetlova, M., Zerwas, S., & Ramani, G. (2010). The head bone's connected to the neck bone: when do toddlers represent their own body topography?. Child development, 81(3), 797–810. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01434.x

20. Child Psychology . (2021, June). Psychosocial Development in Infancy through Adolescence: Development of Self. Lumen. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/child/chapter/development-of-self-2/

21. Healthdirect Australia Limited. (2025). Development milestones - your child 12 to 18 months. Pregnancy, Birth and Baby. https://www.pregnancybirthbaby.org.au/development-milestones-12-to-18-months#:~:text=phones%20and%20brushes.-,12%2D15%20months,will%20most%20likely%20do%20it

22. Child Psychology . (2021, June). Psychosocial Development in Infancy through Adolescence: Development of Self. Lumen. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/child/chapter/development-of-self-2/

23. Child Psychology . (2021, June). Psychosocial Development in Infancy through Adolescence: Development of Self. Lumen. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/child/chapter/development-of-self-2/

24. Child Psychology . (2021, June). Psychosocial Development in Infancy through Adolescence: Development of Self. Lumen. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/child/chapter/development-of-self-2/

25. Child Psychology . (2021, June). Psychosocial Development in Infancy through Adolescence: Development of Self. Lumen. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/child/chapter/development-of-self-2/

26. Waugh, W., & Brownell, C. (2015). Development of Body Part Vocabulary in Toddlers in Relation to Self-Understanding. Early child development and care, 185(7), 1166–1179. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2014.983915

27. Waugh, W., & Brownell, C. (2015). Development of Body Part Vocabulary in Toddlers in Relation to Self-Understanding. Early child development and care, 185(7), 1166–1179. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2014.983915

28. Child Psychology . (2021, June). Psychosocial Development in Infancy through Adolescence: Development of Self. Lumen. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/child/chapter/development-of-self-2/

29. Julia E. Hanigsberg, Homologizing Pregnancy and Motherhood: A Consideration of Abortion, 94 MICH. L. REV. 371 (1995). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol94/iss2/5

30. Julia E. Hanigsberg, Homologizing Pregnancy and Motherhood: A Consideration of Abortion, 94 MICH. L. REV. 371 (1995). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol94/iss2/5