There is something almost comical about the linguistic journey that progressive politics has taken. Feminism once objected, quite reasonably, to reducing women to their reproductive functions. A woman was not merely a womb, a baby-making machine or an appendage of her reproductive anatomy. Yet after several decades of increasingly elaborate gender theory, parts of the progressive movement have somehow arrived back at precisely the sort of biological reductionism feminism once condemned. A woman cannot safely be called a woman, so she becomes a person with a uterus, a menstruator, a birthing person or, in Talarico's particularly neighbourly formulation, a "neighbour with a uterus."
The obvious defence is that Talarico is attempting to be inclusive. Some people who identify as transgender men or non-binary retain female reproductive organs and can become pregnant, and therefore abortion advocates sometimes employ anatomical rather than sex-based terminology. Talarico himself has explicitly linked his abortion position to the transgender community. Whatever one thinks of that reasoning, however, the resulting language creates problems of its own, because inclusion achieved by making ordinary words unusable can quickly become exclusion by another route.
Indeed, Talarico's phrase invites a delightful reductio ad absurdum. If the relevant political category is really "neighbours with a uterus," then where does that leave transgender women? They are women according to the gender doctrine that motivates this vocabulary, but they generally do not have uteruses. Talarico's supposedly inclusive category therefore excludes some women. If he says that "neighbours with a uterus" are the people whose reproductive freedom is at stake, he has implicitly classified people according to female reproductive biology. But that is precisely the biological distinction that contemporary gender ideology insists cannot define womanhood.
The logical maze gets worse the further one travels into it. Suppose we ask the simple question: who needs an abortion? The answer is people who can become pregnant. Who can become pregnant? Human beings possessing the relevant functioning female reproductive biology. Historically there was a remarkably convenient word for the sex possessing that reproductive organisation: women. There are infertile women, post-menopausal women and women who have undergone hysterectomies, of course, but nobody imagined that these exceptions rendered the biological category meaningless. "Women" described a sex, not a guarantee that every individual member possessed every typical organ or reproductive capacity.
Once "woman" has been detached from sex, however, political language must perform increasingly awkward verbal gymnastics. The speaker wants to discuss a biological function that overwhelmingly concerns women, while simultaneously denying that biology determines who is a woman. Hence the uterus suddenly marches onto centre stage. The attempt to escape biological sex ends up producing language more anatomically obsessed than the terminology it replaced.
There is also something strangely impersonal about it. Imagine applying Talarico's linguistic principle consistently across ordinary life. A men's prostate-cancer campaign might address "neighbours with prostates." Breast screening could target "neighbours with mammary tissue." An obstetrician could welcome "neighbours possessing cervixes." We could dispense with mothers and fathers altogether and speak of gestational and inseminating neighbours. The resulting vocabulary might satisfy an ideological taxonomy, but nobody would mistake it for natural human speech.
That matters because political language does more than transmit technical information. It tells people how politicians see them. Women are not wandering collections of organs requiring bureaucratically correct descriptions. They are daughters, sisters, mothers, wives, colleagues, friends and citizens. A politician who cannot utter the ordinary word "woman" while discussing a question overwhelmingly concerning women risks sounding less humane rather than more inclusive.
There is an additional irony in Talarico's case because he presents himself explicitly as a Christian politician and Presbyterian seminarian, and religious language features prominently in his politics. Recent reporting has highlighted his tendency to frame progressive political positions through Christianity, including his arguments about abortion and his criticism of what he calls Christian nationalism. Yet Christianity possesses an intensely embodied understanding of humanity. Human beings are not interchangeable consciousnesses temporarily inhabiting arbitrary pieces of anatomy. Christianity takes embodiment, sexual difference, motherhood and fatherhood seriously, beginning with the creation narratives and continuing through the extraordinary importance it attaches to incarnation itself.
None of this determines the abortion debate by linguistic fiat. One can believe abortion should be legal while continuing to call women "women," just as one can oppose abortion without accepting every conservative argument about sex and gender. The important point is that the peculiar vocabulary is not necessary to the substantive political position. It is an ideological addition, signalling adherence to a particular theory of gender.
That is why the reductio is useful. Ask Talarico whether transgender women are women. Presumably the answer is yes. Then ask whether transgender women are included among his "neighbours with a uterus." Generally, no. Therefore "neighbours with a uterus" cannot be his inclusive synonym for women. It is instead a biological category largely corresponding to females of reproductive age and capacity. Having spent years insisting that biology cannot define womanhood, progressive politics has reinvented a cumbersome biological description because the perfectly serviceable biological word has become politically dangerous.
There is perhaps an unforgivable woke sin hiding here after all. In attempting to include transgender people, Talarico has constructed a category that excludes transgender women from the very group about whose oppression he is speaking. Worse still, he has done so according to anatomy. Follow the logic ruthlessly enough and "neighbours with a uterus" begins looking suspiciously like the sort of sex-based classification gender ideology was supposed to have abolished.
The English language already solved this problem long ago. It supplied us with the word "women." It is short, dignified, universally understood and does not reduce half the human species to possession of a particular internal organ. Perhaps the genuinely progressive move would now be to rediscover it.
https://www.lifenews.com/2026/08/24/james-talarico-trashes-women-calls-them-neighbors-with-a-uterus/