I’m not playing, and not asking you to either. This is a discussion. Don’t diminish it.

First, admitting how little you know is great and thanks for being honest.

Please don’t take offense, but you’re somewhere between 0 and 1, on scale of 1 -10. Seriously, take that with humor and humility. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing something. The error is thinking that you can “smell bullshit” accurately in a domain you admittedly know very little about. Second, whatever you think about Michelle Obama, which I can tell is very little, let’s agree the the clip is a small sound bite of a larger conversation. The clip was presented as such PRECISELY because it is being used to trigger a response from you. You know that, right? You had the immediate *sense* that something feels off and you are calling bullshit. But, you don’t know very much about the topic and, and this is important, you don’t know what else was said prior to, or after, this statement. There might have been additional context or information that could help you. There wasn’t, so I’m going to try to do that now.

What distinguishes a woman’s body from a man’s is more than just a vagina which is just the externally visible sex organ. Other parts of the reproductive system include the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries (just to name a few that you might have heard of). Importantly, the ovaries don’t just produce eggs for pregnancy. They produce hormones during menstruation. Say a woman gets pregnant once in her life, the fact that she menstruates EVERY MONTH (between puberty and menopause) should tell you something by the simple ratio of their occurrence. A woman’s body needs these hormones for her overall health (yes, everything from her brain to her bones to her physical stamina and energy levels). The ovaries are *far more* important to a woman’s general health than her vagina, even though both are part of her reproductive system. Understanding this, take a moment to watch the video again and you’ll see that what she’s saying is that you can’t you reduce a woman’s reproductive health to *just* giving birth, and that it is, in fact, “the least important thing about the reproductive system as a whole.”

To really hammer this home, consider that some women never give birth, and yet, their reproductive system is still vital to their general health and well-being on a daily basis. Nothing about what I’ve just written is controversial. That is, unless you don’t know how a woman’s body works. Her point is that lawmakers and politicians, especially religious ones, have about as good of an understanding about women’s health as you do… which is to say, very little. This is not meant to divide us, or insult men, or put women’s needs over anyone else’s.

It’s simply a fact that if you don’t know much about a subject, you should not hold strong opinions about it, and you definitely shouldn’t be legislating on it, or even advising others on what they should do with regards to the topic.

Does this make sense?