An innocent reference to Baby New Year as an “it” the other night started a nice round of fireworks to usher out 2005. Someone insisted that because the effigy symbolized rebirth for mankind, it must be a boy, which started a secondary fire around whether “mankind” or “humankind” is politically correct. Someone else argued it’s a girl, using basically the same rationale they employ when they give God ovaries. My friend argued that viewing the baby as genderless was the only choice someone truly interested in equality could make and pointed directly at me. Go figure.

I said I didn’t care about equality. My friends arched their eyebrows to their hairlines, and I thought their faces might explode. I quickly added the qualifier: “at least not in this instance.” If I got to choose, I said, I’d make Baby New Year 2006 a female because, all in all, 2005 was a lousy year for women.

It’s not just that Iowans have never sent a woman to Congress or to the governor’s mansion and, save a come-from-behind win by dark horse gubernatorial candidate Patty Judge, it doesn’t look like 2006 will be the year for either of those milestones to occur. It’s not the pay gap or the glass ceiling or even the fact that women who can’t afford high-quality legal services encounter difficulty extracting themselves from violent relationships or that there are too many moms out there trying to be a dad, too. It’s all of that, compounded by all that scariness happening with the Supreme Court. This is scary. We need to make sure that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens are taking their vitamins.

Oh sure, President Bush pandered to women by offering up Harriet Miers as a nominee to fill retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. (Was it just me, or did anyone think it was a “you got your woman, are you happy now?” moment?) Women make up 51 percent of the population, yet if Bush has his way, eight of the nine justices will be men. That seems like the kind of math my big brother used years ago when he apportioned out the M&M’s our grandparents brought us kids by color. Pity the sap who was assigned the red ones.

In the end, he mollified his conservative political base by offering up ultraconservative Samuel Alito, whose record makes Chief Justice John Roberts look moderate by comparison. But let’s face it. Neither of these men seems to think a woman should make her own reproductive decisions.

As a nation, can’t we please stop arguing about this? Part of the population feels one way and part of the population feels another, and neither group is going to change the other’s mind because their positions are aligned with their own individual moral compasses. There isn’t a lot of gray area on the subject of abortion, even when circumstances such as rape, incest and the safety of the mother are taken into consideration.

By arguing the point, we’re expending energy as a nation that could be devoted to issues we can actually affect – like the government’s role in easing poverty and encouraging self-reliance, taxation and fiscal responsibility, increasing homeland security without trampling on civil rights, energy conservation and cleaning up the environment, and frankly, why women are represented in the halls of government in such disappointing numbers and whether Americans should send Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice to the White House.