Trevor Noah Doesn't Understand Being a Man

Daily Show host Trevor Noah attacked Florida senator Marco Rubio this week for believing that babies infected with the Zika virus should not be aborted.

“I wish a giant mosquito would f*** Rubio and leave him pregnant with a Zika baby,” Noah said. “Then we’ll see how much he believes in those laws.”

Here are Rubio’s remarks from earlier this week:

When you present it in the context of Zika or any prenatal condition, it’s a difficult question and a hard one. But if I’m going to err, I’m going to err on the side of life. . . . I’m not pretending to you that that’s an easy question you asked me. But I’m prolife. And I’m strongly prolife. I believe all human life should be protected by our law, irrespective of the circumstances or condition of that life.

Noah tore into Rubio for his stance, insisting that men shouldn’t be allowed to offer opinions or make laws regarding abortion.

“I don’t understand how any man thinks that he has the right to dictate to women what they should do with their body,” Noah said. “Because men know nothing about what it’s like to be a woman. . . . So why do men always get to make laws about women’s health issues?”

He added that men telling women not to have abortions would be like black people being able to control whether or not white people could use sunscreen. A variation of Noah’s argument is often used by those who are pro-abortion in order to shut men out of the abortion debate.

The logic goes something like this: “Women need abortion if they don’t want to be pregnant. Men can never experience being pregnant. Only women can opine on abortion because only women can be pregnant.”

This is wrong for a number of reasons, but consider just two. First, and most importantly, a woman’s body is not the only one involved in abortion; there is also the body of the child being aborted. You don’t need to experience pregnancy to know that abortion ends the life of a child. Men both can and should acknowledge this as wrong.

Second, people who make this argument ignore the fact that women don’t make themselves pregnant. In every decision to abort, a man’s child is being aborted as well. In many cases, the lack of support from the child’s father is a large factor in a woman’s decision to have an abortion.

This is even more of a reason for men to be involved in the conversation. If more men were willing to be supportive fathers—especially in the difficult situations when a child has special needs, like in the case of those infected with Zika—fewer women would feel it necessary to have an abortion.

Instead of mocking men like Rubio, who acknowledge the truth of abortion despite public ridicule, Noah should take a minute to consider what being a man really means.