Talk to any woman who has gestated a foetus to full term, and she’ll tell you what a spiritually rewarding experience that is.
To feel a life growing inside you and then popping out to face the wonders of the world – such joy must transcend the quotidian life and reach out to the mystery of man, the mystery of God.
As a passionate believer in universal human rights, those bestowed not by some nebulous God but by the tangible, ironclad UN Declaration, I regard this transcendent experience as an inalienable right of every sexually mature human being, irrespective of sex… sorry, I mean gender, how very reactionary of me.
However, this indisputable right, bestowed by the United Church of Internationalism, has so far been denied to a full half of mankind… sorry, I mean personkind, how very reactionary of me. Granted, some men keep on trying to partake of this ineffable joy – 1.5 per cent of us if you believe research, or 25 per cent if you believe Peter Tatchell and other dedicated fighters for this sacred right.
Alas, all their vigorous, thrusting efforts to be impregnated by fellow men have remained in vain, frustrating their souls, blighting their lives and enraging those observers who, like me, are passionately devoted to equality über alles, the phrase Germans use to sing but prudently don’t any longer.
Any inequality demands correction and restitution, no one can argue against that. The first step is to acknowledge the enormity of it all and offer one’s heartfelt apologies.
His Holiness Pope Francis showed how the other day, by stating from the height of his ecclesiastical authority that “the Church not only should apologise to a gay person whom it offended but it must also apologise to the poor as well, to the women who have been exploited, to children who have been exploited by work.”
No parallel demand was issued for reciprocal apology from ‘gay persons’ who might have offended the Church, and quite right too. The Church, as everyone knows, is history’s greatest, nay only, oppressor, and she’s the one to keep apologising till the cardinals come home.
That’s the only way to pour balm on historical wounds, to alleviate the pain suffered by ‘gay persons’, women and children since that nasty male God chose to punish women by making childbirth excruciatingly painful.
All of us good Christians should sign, if only inwardly, this plea for forgiveness, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find something else to apologise for, thereby correcting the pontiff’s omission. So here I am, on bended knee, offering my grovelling apologies to all those men who have since the time of Adam craved pregnancy but have been denied life’s unique experience by the cruelty of God and inadequacy of medical science.
You might think that, being neither God nor a medical scientist, I’m not to blame for this outrage personally. That only goes to show it’s you and not me who’s hopelessly reactionary. There’s no such thing as individual guilt – all guilt is collective, shared equally by every member of the delinquent group and indeed society at large. So, on behalf of all men who have never wanted to get pregnant I’m hereby offering an apology to those who have.
Now comes the restitution part, doubtless inspired by courageous women like Chastity Bowick, born a man but miraculously transformed into a woman, and an appropriately named one at that. As a boy, Chastity dreamed about giving birth one day: “If you’re a trans woman, this is a way of completing the dream,” says Chastity, now as feminine as any woman you’d ever wish to meet, provided it’s not in a dark alley.
Well, Chastity, there is Santa Claus: the dream is about to become reality. According to Scientific American, the wonders of modern science are such that a former man can – or at least soon will be able to – become pregnant by uterine transplant:
“Here is how it could work: First, a patient would likely need castration surgery and high doses of exogenous hormones because high levels of male sex hormones, called androgens, could threaten pregnancy. (Although hormone treatments can be powerful, patients would likely need to be castrated because the therapy might not be enough to maintain the pregnancy among patients with testes.) The patient would also need surgery to create a ‘neovagina’ that would be connected to the transplant uterus, to shed menses and give doctors access to the uterus for follow-up care.”
A lovely read, that. All those technical glitches mentioned are soon to be removed – the march of progress is unstoppable. If something can be done, it must be done: progress springs to life from this unassailable premise. Hence before long it’s new women like Chastity who will develop that majestic glow hitherto denied them.
All we can do is rejoice with them, while apologising unreservedly for the cruelty of having denied them this dream for so long. I do hope His Holiness will join me in expressing such sentiments – he can do grovelling apology with the best of them.