And now, the rediscovery of women seems to have moved beyond the issue of abortion. “Imagine a World Where Men Had to Breastfeed Their Babies,” an essay by New York Times contributing opinion writer Elizabeth Spiers, appeared in Wednesday’s paper. Spiers wrote that the recent baby-formula shortage shows “the ways in which new motherhood, venerated in theory, is not fully supported in practice.”

What progressives have rediscovered, then, is that men and women are different. They are distinct entities — not just biologically, but in every sense of the word. That’s not a bad thing; in fact, properly understood, these differences are profoundly beautiful. Men and women are made for each other. On the deepest spiritual level, the tragedy of the recent effort to “deconstruct gender” — transforming pregnancy into a genderless function of “personhood” and blurring the lines between men’s and women’s relationship to children, the family, and one another — is that it robs both genders of their distinctive characteristics, of the very heart of what and who they are. To abolish difference is to destroy all that makes us human, reducing us to so many faceless “persons” in the name of an abstract standard of “equity.” So yes: Women, in the final analysis, exist. Speaking as the son of a woman, I’m glad they do. It’s too bad that it took something as gruesome as abortion-on-demand for progressives to realize as much.