SKIRMISHER

Hakuo Yanagisawa, minister of health, labor and welfare, has been desperate for new Japanese babies that in a recent speech, he actually referred to women as “baby machines.”

According to several witnesses at the meeting, Yanagisawa used the metaphor in reference to the declining birth rate in a 30-minute speech on the future of pension, welfare and medical systems.

“The number of women aged 15 to 50 is fixed. As we have a fixed number of birth-giving machines and devices, all we can ask of them is that each do their best,” Yanagisawa said.
…
One person in the audience said Yanagisawa apparently was trying to encourage women to make efforts to have children.

Yanagisawa on Sunday denied he had intended to discriminate against women.

“I was trying to make it easier for the audience to understand, but it was not appropriate,” Yanagisawa told The Asahi Shimbun in Shizuoka.

Yanagisawa said he used the machine image because the audience appeared to have difficulty understanding what he meant when he referred to demographic statistics.

Now that Yanagisawa has hit a nerve, with many women calling for his resignation, it might even become more difficult to encourage these “baby machines” to do their “baby making job” just to piss him off and prove him they’re not really baby machines, but bad-ass biatches.

via ASAHI

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