View from the North 40: It's so hysterical I could cry

OK, I tried to stay out of it, I had a whole column planned about the pitfalls of the most adult activity of my life, then a political candidate from Missoula threw out the right bait at the right time and now I’ve been lured into the Roe v. Wade free-for-all debate.

A bear can resist only so many garbage cans, and I could not resist the lure of this anti-abortion regulation argument: Rep. Brad Tschida, R-Missoula, who is running for Senate District 49, said in an email to more than 100 fellow legislators Monday that “the womb is the only organ in a woman’s body that serves no specific purpose to her life or well-being.”

KTVH first reported on the email, which was later obtained by the Daily Montanan. Tschida told the Daily Montanan that he first heard the comment from a pro-life woman in a podcast, though he couldn’t remember the name of the podcast.

Nevertheless, he wrote in the email that the woman said “the womb is a place set aside for another person who arrives as a result of a choice of a man and a woman to procreate.”

Tschida said he was particularly struck by what this woman said.

As am I.

It seems she learned about baby-making in her “S-E-X is a Naughty No-No Unless You Put a Ring On It” Education class, where they also taught the scientific names for S-E-X organs are the petunia and the cornstalk, and after all the kernels pop from the cob to litter their popcorn around the petunia’s pot, a fully formed baby the size of Thumbelina magically sprouts in a secret garden, where it waits dutifully until it becomes a full-size baby.

Tschida, though, took a more philosophical view of the science of female anatomy and wrote in his email that the womb “is truly a sanctuary.”

A sanctuary, Brad?

I took the time to look up the word in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, and it didn’t mention the uterus.

In fact, here’s the list of synonyms: sanctum, shrine, reliquary (which is a container for holy relics, and a portable reliquary is a fereter), martyry, asylum, bolt-hole (don’t laugh), harbor, harborage, haven, refuge, retreat, shelter, oasis, anchorage, mooring, port, cover, screen, abode, diggings, domicile, dwelling, habitation, house, housing, lodging, lodgment or lodgement, pad, place, quarters, residence, rest, roof, cloister, closet, covert, den, hermitage, hideaway, hideout, lair (my personal favorite), castle, fastness, fort, fortress, palisade, redoubt, stronghold, lean-to, lee, shed or windbreak.

Nary a uterus mentioned. So what’s with the sanctuary idea?

Does Tschida imagine a day when he’s being chased down the street by an hysterical mob of pro-choice women wearing their anatomically explicit pink hats that have been in storage since the morning after the worldwide Women’s March Jan. 21, 2017, but he’ll be able to run up to the nearest woman most likely to have a functioning uterus, but also wearing a MAGA hat, and yell, “Sanctuary! Womb sanctuary! On the grounds of political persecution, woman, grant me female womb sanctuary!”

Oh, Brad, wombs don’t work that way.

But I get it. Speaking of the organ at the center of the abortion rights controversy in detached and dehumanizing language is an attempt to make less personal the issue of taking away women’s rights to decision-making autonomy — with bonus points for the positive-sounding word.

This act of findness is timely, since state Attorney General Austin Knudsen has petitioned the Montana Supreme Court to consider the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in an appeal of four state abortion laws, the Daily Montanan said. Montana’s protection is based on privacy like the former federal protection.

Honestly, this is such a hot-button issue we might have to drag that old “female hysteria” diagnosis out of its medical terminology mothballs.

You know the Latin term for womb is hystera, which is how we got the term hysterectomy — a womb-ectomy, or removal. Logical. It’s also the basis for hysterical, but if womb-erical doesn’t make sense, it’s because the only way to get to hysterical is through “female hysteria,” short for “female womb disorder.”

Made popular in the 1700s and 1800s and medically referenced in the U.S. until 1968, female hysteria was a catch-all diagnosis for everything from water retention to depression, sexual thoughts, loss of those thoughts, depression, schizophrenia, chronic pain, etc. Once hysteria caught on as a diagnostic term, men were occasionally diagnosed with male hysteria too, for a short time. They were generally told to go outside and exercise. Women’s treatments included rest, start smoking or get married, they were often put in insane asylums and given hysterectomies. Patient consent wasn’t deemed necessary. These women were, after all, hysterical.

In a sense, Tschida isn’t wrong about the womb not being needed, strictly speaking.

By the same logic, though, modern medicine — which has no replacement for a functioning womb — has rendered the testes pointless.

They’re just factories and warehouses for millions of mobile, single-cell womb invaders. Immediately post-puberty, guys could be required by law to store a few factory runs of these gametes in a freezer for use when they need to create progeny, then just be prescribed a blue pill to prop up prostate function, as needed.

Or is that hysterical.

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No doubt this would significantly lower abortion statistics at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .