"An adult or sometimes even juvenile human being reduced into simply a carrying vehicle for a fetus." That's how Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan physician and political figure, described pregnant women on national television — without ever using the word "women."
The English language has had two perfectly good words for this since roughly forever. El-Sayed managed to dodge both of them.
The clip shows El-Sayed twisting himself into linguistic knots during what should have been a straightforward policy discussion. "Abdul El-Sayed won't even say the word woman while talking about pregnancy," RNC Research noted, which is the kind of sentence that shouldn't need to be written but here we are.
Tom Elliott put it simply: "Nobody talks like that in real life." He's right. Nobody at a grocery store, a doctor's office, or a Thanksgiving dinner has ever referred to their pregnant sister as a "carrying vehicle." That's not how humans communicate. That's how someone communicates when they're terrified of their own base.
Rich Lowry captured the mechanism at work: "So much euphemism and jargon... avoiding saying women should be able to abort their babies." The progressive language machine has reached the point where its operators can't even name the people they claim to be defending. You're fighting for women's rights, but you can't say "women." Noted.
This isn't El-Sayed's first brush with treating actual humans like abstractions. He once wrote an op-ed describing breast cancer patients and survivors as people with "social power and privilege." Women battling cancer — privileged. The man has a gift for making vulnerable people disappear inside his own vocabulary.
He also called his primary opponent Haley Stevens "the least capable candidate" who was "unable to string two coherent sentences together." That's a fascinating insult from a man who just described half the human race as "adult or sometimes even juvenile humans" rather than say the word sitting right there on the tip of his tongue.
Then there's the age and sex discrimination lawsuit. El-Sayed was named in a suit alleging he refused to work with women over 40. So we have a pattern: can't say "women," can't work with women, and describes their most fundamental biological experience as a logistical arrangement involving a "carrying vehicle."
The progressive position on gender has traveled an interesting road. It started with "women deserve equal rights." Then it became "people who menstruate deserve equal rights." Now we've arrived at "adult or sometimes even juvenile humans serving as carrying vehicles deserve equal rights."
The word is "women." Five letters. Two syllables. El-Sayed has a medical degree.