For just asking her who is capable of giving birth, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley was accused by a Berkeley professor this week of stoking violence and self-harm among transgendered people.

He’s got one word for that charge: crazy.

“This idea that men can get pregnant, and that if you don’t say that men can get pregnant that you’re responsible for violence, I think that’s crazy,” Hawley told The Heartlander in an interview Thursday. “I mean, just in a word, I think it’s absolutely crazy.”

In the bizarre exchange at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on abortion, Hawley wondered what Berkeley Law professor Khiara M. Bridges meant when she used the phrase “people with a capacity for pregnancy.”

“Would that be women?” asked Hawley.

“Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy,” Bridges said. “Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy.”

“So, this isn’t really a women’s rights issue,” the senator replied.

“We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Sen. Hawley,” she responded.

“All right, so your view is that the core of this right, then, is about what?” 

“So,” the professor said, “I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic, and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them.”

“Wow,” a startled Hawley replied. “You’re saying that I’m opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?”

Bridges then simply noted a statistic that 1 in 5 transgendered people have attempted suicide. The college professor in turn asked Hawley if men can get pregnant, to which he said no – to which a chuckling Bridges concluded that he is denying that trans people even exist.

“These liberals and the Democrats believe this stuff,” Hawley told The Heartlander. “And more than that, they want to force everybody else to either believe it or to be silenced. I think that’s a big reason why normal people look at today’s Democrat Party and they’re like, ‘this is insanity.’ 

“And you know what? It really matters in practical terms, because these are the same people who want to eliminate women’s sports. They want to force women to have to compete against biological men on the theory that there really is no such thing as male or female. 

“Well, sorry, but I don’t think women’s sports should be eliminated. And I don’t think men can get pregnant.”

Do Hawley’s Democratic Senate colleagues agree with the professor that men can get pregnant, and that questioning the proposition endangers trans people?

“I noticed that no Democrat came to her defense,” Hawley says, “but on the other hand, the Democrats didn’t repudiate it either. I’ve heard my Democrat colleagues refuse to use the word ‘woman’; they talk about ‘birthing people’.

“I mean, this is really about the erasure of women, and it’s ironic coming from a party that says they’re the party of supporting women – but in fact, they don’t want to talk about women’s rights. Apparently they don’t believe they exist anymore.”

In another abortion matter, Hawley Thursday filed the Pregnancy Resource Center Defense Act to protect pro-life clinics that offer alternatives to abortion, as well as houses of worship, from growing pro-abortion violence.

“The Biden administration has turned a blind eye while radical leftists attack pregnancy care centers and houses of worship,” Hawley said in a statement. “And now left-wing politicians are trying to shut them down. It’s time to put an end to the attacks and get tough on thugs who engage in violence, arson, and other means of destruction.”

At the same Judiciary hearing where he had the strange exchange with the college professor, Hawley listed several of his Democrat colleagues – Sens. Elizabeth Warner, Bob Menendez and Mark Warner – who oppose the often Christian-run crisis pregnancy centers that offer alternatives to abortion.

Warren has gone so far as to say crisis pregnancy centers “are there to fool people” who are looking to have abortions into choosing life – and she seemed horrified in a video that the pro-life centers in Massachusetts outnumber abortion clinics 3 to 1.

“You should not be able to torture a pregnant person,” Warren said of her desire to shut pro-life pregnancy centers down nationwide. There are an estimated 3,000 of them.

For his part, Warner has asked Google to keep pro-life crisis pregnancy centers from appearing in search results for abortion.