An interesting exchange during a Senate hearing has recently gone viral on the social media site X and other platforms.
The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee in the upper chamber of Congress held an inquiry on the topic of abortion pills on Wednesday, 14 January. One of the people giving testimony was one Dr Nisha Verma, an obstetrician and gynaecologist who provides reproductive health care in the states of Georgia and Massachusetts.
During the hearing, dr Verma was asked a very straightforward question by Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. Senator Hawley wanted to know if the doctor thinks that men can get pregnant. The bizarre way Dr Verma equivocated in her answer to the seemingly very simple question has raised a lot of eyebrows. So much so that the video of the exchange shared by Senator Hawley on his X page has received over 130,000 likes in two days.
Dr Verma started by stating she hesitates to answer because she was not sure ‘what the goal was’ of that question, then declared that she takes care of ‘patients of different identities’ and ‘many women’.
Since none of those statements answered his question, Senator Hawley repeated it as plainly as he could. To this, the response from the witness was to, almost verbatim, repeat her previous statements.
Sneator Hawley stressed that his goal with his questioning is to seek the truth; and appealed to Dr Verma’s previous claim during the hearing that ‘science and evidence should control, not politics,’ but to no avail. In that five-minute exchange, even after the question was specified to biological men, at no point did she dare state that men in fact cannot get pregnant.
At the end of the bizarre conversation, the Missouri Senator ended up chastizing the doctor, saying: ‘Your refusal to recongize women as women as and men as men is deeply corrosive to science, to public trust, and yes, to constitutional protections for women as well.’
Ironically, the organization Physicians for Reproductive Health put out a public statement before Dr Verma’s testimony, in which they claim that the hearing was ‘organized by anti-abortion policymakers’ and ‘will share misinformation and disinformation about medication abortion,’ but Dr Verma will be there to ‘share her clinical and research expertise’ on the subject. The hearing, however, did not pan out that way in the public eye.
In the wake of the incident, Congressman Buddy Carter, a Republican from Georgia, put out a public statement of his own, calling for the revocation of Dr Verma’s medical licence.
All this is taking place while the US Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments on a case determining the legality of banning biological men from women’s sports. It is also about four years after Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, serving on the court of the highest court currently deciding on crucial gender policy, infamously claimed she could not define what a woman is because she is ‘not a biologist’ during her confirmation hearing.
Related articles:
