We really don’t need any more proof that leftist policies and platforms are anti-women. From reducing women to reproductive utility with the term “birthing persons,” to edging them out of their own sports competitions and forcing men into their locker rooms, bathrooms, and prisons, the left puts women last.
But considering how hard the Democrat Party tries to pass itself off as the party of women’s rights and specifically women’s reproductive health, leftists’ cold dismissal of vaccine concerns — especially among women — is telling and disturbing.
Women with fertility concerns aren’t the only ones hesitant about getting a COVID vaccine; a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published Monday revealed a quarter of Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 do not plan to get the shot. More than half of young adults wary of the vaccine cited included “concerns about vaccine side effects” or “distrust of COVID-19 vaccines.”
But many women are uniquely cautious about the shot due to reproductive concerns. For the safety of their babies, pregnant women are rarely included in clinical trials for new drugs and treatments. As a result, there is often little data showing how experimental treatments may affect pregnancies, current or future. The CDC found pregnant women were less than half as likely to get the vaccine as young nonpregnant women, who are already significantly cautious.
That’s not to say the COVID-19 vaccine necessarily harms women’s reproductive health. In fact, the corporate media’s vague pantheon of oft-cited “experts” condescendingly assures us it doesn’t. But it’s also cold and maddening to shame women for wanting to wait before getting an experimental vaccine that still has only emergency authorization, not official approval, from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“The possibility of injecting my body with an experimental vaccine, for which I had very little data to assure me it’s fully safe for my baby this early in life, was … scary,” Kelsey Bolar wrote for The Federalist a few weeks ago. “I know first-hand that the advice within the medical community on this issue is far from uniform, and the studies are not yet there.”
Just this week, nearly 4,000 women in the United Kingdom reported menstrual irregularities or unexpected bleeding after getting the COVID-19 vaccine. And when U.S. officials urged a temporary halt of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine in April, it was due to blood clotting in six patients with one fatality — all women between 18 and 48 years old.
Why doesn’t the left care to be a mouthpiece for the thousands of women who are cautious about getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Since when did they stop even pretending to give women the benefit of the doubt, let alone the overweening dominance of “believe all women”?
Instead, women getting fired or shamed over their hesitancy are receiving virtually no support from the corporate media or other leftist mouthpieces. Bonnie Jacobson, a waitress in New York City, told the New York Post in February she was fired after waiting to get the vaccine “because there just isn’t enough data or research at this point on its effects on fertility.”
A hospital in Houston, Texas, suspended 178 employees for not getting the vaccine, prompting a lawsuit that a federal judge dismissed last week. “No one should be forced to put something into their body if they’re not comfortable with it,” argued nurse Jennifer Bridges.
While men have just as much right to not be publicly punished for their private health decisions, the intolerance surrounding vaccine caution disproportionately hurts women. Anyone who actually stands for women’s health — and their freedom to make informed and sensitive health decisions — wouldn’t brush off their concerns in such a patronizing way.
Instead, so-called feminists are too busy worrying over instances of anti-women discrimination that are often exaggerated or imagined — from “sexism” in church leadership roles to not enough sexism in “The Queen’s Gambit” to the discrimination that is supposedly inherent in returning to in-person work.
It’s an old trope of sexism to brush off women’s sincere opinions and concerns, patting them on the head with condescending assurances that their superiors know what’s better for them than they do. The COVID-19 vaccine industry, backed by leftist media “experts” and the politicians and corporations shoving vaccines down our throats (or rather, into our arms), is doing the same thing.
“Anti-vaxxer communities have long been associated with women,” Politico finger-wagged, deriding fertility concerns as “the myth about women and the Covid-19 vaccine that won’t die.” Other “experts” brushed off the vaccine’s menstrual complications as “coincidence.”
Instead of telling women their caution is irrational, self-proclaimed advocates for women’s rights should be listening to their concerns. It’s already apparent the left doesn’t put women’s health and safety above convenient narratives and identity politics, but dismissing their health concerns about vaccines is one more example of infuriating condescension from those who pretend to care about women.
