Did Michelle Obama insult women’s ability to ‘produce life,’ or is there more to the story?

Last October, Michelle Obama made remarks during a Michigan rally promoting strident abortion devotee Kamala Harris, pleading with attendees to cast their votes in favor of legalized abortion — and Obama recently repeated similar sentiments, appearing to downplay women’s ability to “produce life.” But is there more that lies beneath her comments?

Key Takeaways:

• Michelle Obama has gotten into hot water for making remarks that appeared to disparage women’s ability to “produce life.”

• Her remarks, however, seem to focus more broadly on the idea that far too often, “women’s health” is narrowly focused on abortion.

• While her ideas about abortion and life in the womb are points of disagreement, pro-lifers may be able to find points of agreement with Obama regarding the need for more of a focus on learning about women’s unique physiology and on treating women over the course of their lives.

• Obama and her podcast guests would likely be more helpful to women if they did not disparage women’s reproductive capabilities as burdens and pit women against their own preborn children.

The Details:

In the same 2024 speech for the Harris-Walz campaign, Obama begged voters, “Please do not put… our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men who have no clue or do not care what we as women are going through.”

In May, she repeated similar sentiments on her podcast, “IMO” (In My Opinion), stating:

… So many men have no idea about what women go through, right? We haven’t been researched, we haven’t been considered. And it still affects the way a lot of male lawmakers, a lot of male politicians, a lot of male religious leaders think about the issue of choice as if it’s just about the fetus, the baby. 

But women’s reproductive health is about our life. It’s about this whole complicated reproductive system that the least of what it does is produce life. It’s a very important thing that it does, but you only produce life if the machine that’s producing it — if you want to whittle us down to a machine — is functioning in a healthy, streamlined kind of way.

But there is no discussion or apparent connection between the two.

Why It Matters:

Obama’s remarks didn’t go over well with a lot of people, as she seemed to be downplaying the importance of motherhood and the miraculous gift of fertility.

Presenting abortion as a mere “choice” reveals that Obama knows she isn’t referring to some sort of “emergency” situation where a woman’s life is in danger but to an elective procedure. In fact, she sees killing a child as a valid decision for a woman to make, even though that woman’s reproductive system — the “machine” — was working the way a healthy human reproductive system is expected to work.

The “connection” Obama is missing is the result of treating women’s fertility as if it’s a disease to be eradicated instead of something to be valued. This has led to a famine of real treatments for women who are experiencing infertility.

IVF Doesn't Heal Infertility

Obama’s remarks did seem to disparage actual reproduction as the “least” valuable function of the female reproductive system (which makes little sense, given that it’s called the “reproductive system”), but some media pointed out that Obama was also broadly addressing the fact that “women’s health” has been reduced to the mere issue of abortion, while real women’s healthcare is much more broad. And if this is what Michelle Obama meant to say, even pro-lifers might agree with her on that point.

Many pro-life women are weary of seeing “women’s health” continually used as a euphemism for “the ‘right’ to abort a child.”

Take the time to read the comments on Instagram or Facebook posts regarding topics like birth control, ectopic pregnancies, or perimenopause… and what you find is a collective of women commiserating about how they have felt unheard, dismissed, and abandoned by the medical community — their symptoms brushed off as “anxiety” (here’s a prescription for that) or “depression” (and another prescription for that) or simply “too much stress” (here are some less-than-workable suggestions regarding stress reduction).

It’s heartbreaking and frustrating to read the numerous stories of women who are truly suffering because their concerns have been diminished (by a largely male cohort of physicians) for decades.

Obama’s guest, Dr. Sharon Malone, pointed out that it was not until 1993 that it was mandated that women be included in clinical trials. “Most of what we know about medications, most of what we know about medical devices… the research has been done on men and extrapolated to women,” Malone said. “Because the thought was, women are complicated. They’ve got all these hormone things going on; that’ll mess up our research… So 1993 was the first time women were included.”

She also stated that in the grand scheme of things, a very small percentage of funding is put toward research that is focused on women and their health.

Unfortunately, when asked “what keeps [her] up at night” regarding women’s health, Malone’s first mention was abortion, and she perpetuated the false, widespread media narratives that pro-life laws are 1) causing harm to women who are miscarrying or having pregnancy issues, and 2) keeping OBGYNs from practicing in pro-life states.

Commentary:

Obama and Malone could do women everywhere a favor by changing their thinking:

• Stop acting as if deliberate killing is healthcare.

• Stop acting as if women can’t receive real healthcare in emergencies unless they allow their babies to be dismembered inside them.

• Demand more from doctors so they learn how to practice healing instead of harming.

• Demand that doctors practice medicine as if the lives of both mother and child matter.

Here are some ideas for how to get women’s health to be taken seriously:

• If women’s health is to be taken seriously, it should never involve the direct and intentional killing of a woman’s offspring in the womb. Expecting to remain unscathed in all ways — physically, mentally, spiritually — after killing one’s own child is entirely unrealistic. We are connected to our children, born or preborn.

• If women’s health is to be taken seriously, we must respect women’s ability to carry and bear children instead of treating it as a burden or a curse.

• If women’s health is to be taken seriously, we must not simply “use” women’s bodies as surrogates, acting as if they really are little more than “machines,” to borrow from Obama’s terminology — when in reality, we are far more than biological machines who form very real bonds that are rarely severed without consequence.

• If women’s health is to be taken seriously, we must look for ways to heal the root causes of infertility, endometriosis, and other issues — instead of using hormonal contraceptives or IVF as if they are “cures” for complex issues. They are not.

• If women’s health is to be taken seriously, it must encompass lifetime care. We spend about 35-40 years of our lives in the “reproductive” zone and the rest of our lives outside it.