What We Talk About When We Talk About Elizabeth Bruenig
The once-beloved “leftist” is facing backlash for her anti-abortion views. Why did it take this long?
The first time I realized something was off about Elizabeth Bruenig, I was looking at her uterus. She had followed me on Twitter after I’d criticized someone named Matt Bruenig for harassing female journalists; she didn’t tell me they were married, and she was so friendly that I didn’t suspect. Her friendliness had a disconcerting edge to it. Every time I got too loud about gender (which was often) she’d pop in with one or two tiny questions, just a teensy correction, just a leeeeeeeetle suggestion that maybe I was taking this whole sexism thing a little bit too seriously and possibly I should just relax? Maybe? A bit???
I told her I thought everyone had a responsibility to fight sexism. She told me she was “just a kid” who never even wrote about gender (this will be important later) and anyway, what did I expect her to do?
Things came to a head when Newsweek published a cover story about “America’s abortion wars.” The cover showed an image of a fetus in the second or third trimester; like most such imagery, it displaced any image of the pregnant person (whose right to an abortion was, presumably, the cause of the “war”) and was…
