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?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle

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A young white woman crosses her fingers behind her back. Because she is young and white, this clearly cannot signify any mischief.
She’s definitely not up to anything, right? Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

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…

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