I don’t know about you, dear reader, but the first notion that struck me after I read this was What did their parents do to these academics. However, evidence for that being impossible for me to obtain, we’ll look at the paper instead.
Let’s take the easy bits first. Is pregnancy necessary for human survival? Some “gender” theorists deny it, but the answer is yes. And not only for humans! Indeed, this thing called, or what used to be called, sexual reproduction is in fact not uncommon out in the world. Even snails must suffer the indignity of penetration and the resulting external organisms invading their females’ bodies.
And not just snails. Praying mantises, where at least the females always take their revenge, deer, birds, worms, sharks, ticks, and every kind of creepy crawly you can name spend some portion of their short lives trying to create this “disease” in one other, and with all show of enthusiasm. This being so, and given the terrific rate of reproduction of most species, the world must be filled to overflowing with “disease.” Is this lamentable? Only if all “diseases” are bad.
This lays bare our academics’ central problem. As we’ll see, for every definition of disease they can imagine, they discover to their amazement they can squeeze pregnancy into it. Therefore, they reason, pregnancy must be a disease. This follows, but the conclusion falls into what I call the Big Muscles Fallacy.
The BMF happens when an explanation for some thing must be had, one is give or proposed, and the person offering it says it must be true because they can’t think of anything else. They claim Big Intellectual Muscles. I write in Everything You Believe Is Wrong (second edition is forthcoming) this would be like a Harvard graduate looking at a math problem and declaring it is unsovlable because they themself cannot solve it. Academics as a species are the most prone to this Fallacy, for obvious reasons.
