Militant feminists have long considered playwright George Bernard Shaw as one of their own.  Perhaps Shaw is the only man of letters worthy of inclusion in the sisterhood of writers ranging from George Sand to Germaine Greer, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Steinem.

Pygmalion's professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, at first blush is the archetype of the dominant male manipulator of class-repressed women, using a man's socio-economic ascendancy to transform a woman into his own image.  But by the end of the play, Eliza, the flower-monger, has turned the tables, declaring her independence, having manipulated the good professor by taking from him only what she needed -- the opportunity for the right time and place in asserting her own personality, intellect, and ambition.

Feminist stage and screen critics have not been as kind to Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady, the movie musical version of Pygmalion.  L & L's professor Higgins, portrayed to perfection by Rex Harrison, is vilified as a misogynist, a belittling and demeaning bully masquerading as a clever wit. 

In a tantalizing irony, My Fair Lady's most male chauvinistic interlude, "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?"-- wistfully chanted by Higgins to his pliant and agreeable pal Col Pickering -- has been the ultimate ambition expropriated by feminists and their liberal brethren since Betty Friedan published her Feminine Mystique in 1963. 

Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Why do they do ev'rything their mothers do?
Why don't they grow up- well, like their father instead?

Initially, feminists demanded independence and equality in the pursuit of intellectual status and economic power.  More recently, the feminist agenda has championed the sexual revolución, mainstreaming promiscuity as equal opportunity for women.  Why should men enjoy indiscriminate sex with impunity, while women are unfairly oppressed and shackled to the realities of reproductive biology and its consequences?

Feminism and liberal progressivism have descended from aspirational socio-eco-politics, having secured suffrage and economic equality, into self-loathing rage against tyranny of the womb.  Feminist partisans, now embedded throughout the Democrat Party, have seized medical technology and biochemistry to regulate ovaries and hormones in creating a hybrid species -- females who want reproductive parity with men while denying biological reality and dismissing the traditions of the monogamous family.  Democrats have made shameless shilling over sexual politics into an art form, relentlessly discouraging childbearing while relishing the destruction of the family unit, pressing their ideology against other women who are repelled by the fruits of the feminist elites' revolución.

The War on Women is the sisterhood's War on the Womb.  The layers of sexual identity were confused when Freud described, rather crudely, the phenomenon of penis envy in pubescent girls.  Whatever its defects, Freud's theory at least tried to isolate the psychology of resentment when females first discover they've been dealt a genetic code that is missing something and also carries an "extra weight."  To wit, the 1993 collection of essays by Susan Bordo Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.  That extra weight is the womb.

We know the federal government is a willing and transparent facilitator in the War on the Womb.  As widely reported, while appearing before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius brazenly argued that a reduction in U.S. pregnancies will offset the costs for employers and insurers as they comply with the new mandate requiring all health care plans to cover sterilizations, contraception, and abortifacient drugs.  "The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception," and the estimated cost will go "down[,] not up."

The argument appears to be that population control, via an assault on the womb, is a cost measure, having nothing to do with convenience, lifestyle, power, or ideology.

Feminists aren't fools.  They're not about to give up their power over life now that they can regulate it using whatever means technology has available with no ethical restraints -- while government mandates that someone else pay for exercsing this power.

Sexual organs are a distraction.  Biochemistry resolves such distractions, neutralizing ovaries, preventing its most crippling disease -- called pregnancy -- prescribing the perfect hormonal inequilibrium where self-absorption triumphs over life.

Retaining the biological framework of a woman for sex and selective childbearing, to be turned off and on like a water faucet while acting out life otherwise as a man, has been the holy grail of women's liberationists.  This is the core of feminist politics that has dominated Democrat Party platforms since the 1970s.  It is a significant political principle for Obama and the Democrats in 2012, as their preoccupation with contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients has revealed.

Progressives will never see abortion as an immoral abomination when it serves a higher order good -- preserving a women's ability to repudiate her biology.  Abortion is but another pair of pliers in the toolbox -- albeit the most virulent option -- when either biochemistry or self-restraint has failed.

And we now have the spectacle of a professed Christian leader -- no less than the Episcopalian Very Rev Dr. Katherine Ragsdale, president of the Episcopal Divinity School -- famously asserting in one of her sermons from 2007, "Abortion is a blessing."

Yes.

Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Why do they do ev'rything their mothers do?
Why don't they grow up- well, like their father instead?