From Slate a few months ago:

Homicide Is a Leading Cause of Death for Pregnant People. Abortion Bans Are Making Things Worse.

You know what else is making things worse? Pretending violence against women is violence against people. Pretending violence against women is not specific to women and thus not in any way linked to hatred and contempt and disgust for women.

When Julianne McShane wanted to report on how some of the most vulnerable women in the United States were dealing with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, she knew exactly where she needed to go: Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oklahoma is where two realities collide. It is one of 16 states that have banned abortion almost entirely. “And it has some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence nationwide,” McShane said. “People might not realize how dangerous it is to be pregnant in the context of an abusive relationship, and abortion restrictions, obviously, just make that even more difficult.”

The article itself says women, but the headline says people. Why did Slate do that? Would Slate tweak the headline of an article on racism so that it applied to generic people as opposed to the non-white kind?

On a recent episode of What Next, we spoke about how the new abortion landscape is causing chaos for domestic violence advocates and for victims. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: Before talking about how the Dobbs decision is impacting domestic abuse survivors in this country, I asked Julianne McShane to lay some groundwork for me. At the top of the show, she called pregnancy dangerous for American women. I asked her why.

Julianne McShane: Homicide is actually a leading cause of death for pregnant people in the United States, which is probably pretty shocking to a lot of people. And researchers say that this is probably due to the prevalence of both firearms and intimate partner violence, and obviously widespread access to firearms in this country is something that facilitates intimate partner violence. Many of the experts I talked to pointed out also that domestic violence tends to start or intensify during pregnancy.

How not to “lay some groundwork”: change “women” to “people” when it is in fact women who are the subject of the conversation. “Let’s discuss violence against women.” “Ok but I’m going to make it violence against people instead.”

Particularly if there’s stress about money, if the pregnancy was unplanned—those are things that could drive someone who’s abusive to become more abusive, or to be abusive for the first time. There’s also a paradox. Oftentimes, abusers will actually purposefully try to get someone pregnant to keep them under their control. But then, once they become pregnant and the reality of a future child becomes more clear, abusers can actually get jealous about the fact that a future child is going to take attention away from them. And so that can also be another factor.

Not a single female or male pronoun in that paragraph; result: meaningless gibberish. Who is this mysterious someone? Who is this other someone, or are they the same? Who are “they”? Which “them”?

There’s even this phrase, reproductive coercion, to explain what’s going on here.

Reproductive coercion refers to any kinds of threats or violence against someone’s reproductive health or decisionmaking capacity. That’s how the National Domestic Violence Hotline describes it. This could look like forcibly getting someone pregnant, refusing their access to birth control, sabotaging birth control during sex—also, forcing someone to get an abortion, although evidence suggests that that’s rare and not a widespread issue.

Someone someone their someone – who is that someone exactly?

Why does Slate do this? Why does anyone?