Virginia Lawmaker Refers to Pregnant Women as 'Hosts'

In honor of Valentine’s Day, Virginia State Senator Steve Martin presented to the public his state’s specialty: a batshit, illogical, misogynistic utterance about women’s bodies. Just like they say, Virginia truly is for lovers (of the unborn, that is; it is absolutely not for lovers of women).

After receiving a Valentine’s Day card from women’s health advocates the urged him to support “access to [a] full range of reproductive health options — including preventing unintentional pregnancies, raising healthy children, and choosing safe, legal abortion,” Sen. Martin huffily took to Facebook:

You can count on me to never get in the way of you “preventing” an unintentional pregnancy.” I’m not actually sure what that means, because if it’s “unintentional” you must have been trying to prevent it. And, I don’t expect to be in the room or will I do anything to prevent you from obtaining a contraceptive. However, once a child does exist in your womb, I’m not going to assume a right to kill it just because the child’s host (some refer to them as mothers) doesn’t want it to remain alive.

I’m not sure if there’s any way for someone to be more blatantly express his contempt for women: while the unborn fetus gets the honor of being designated as human being, the pregnant woman is nothing but a dehumanized “host,” an irritating incubator who shouldn’t have been having sex if she didn’t want to suffer the consequences (there’s no completely foolproof way to prevent pregnancy, after all).

At around 3:00 today, Martin edited the post to read “the bearer of the child” instead, which isn’t much better. The sneering, nasty “some refer to them as mothers” has remained unchanged — even though literally every non-deranged person in the world would refer to a woman who begat a child as its mother, not as its “host” or “bearer.” With that said, there’s something insightful in his vile comment: it reveals how completely and callously one must detach oneself from reality in order to adopt a “personhood” view that pregnant women are nothing but fetus-vessels.