"Child" series on Radio 4 - birthing people!

You're not going to get the best possible care if the doctors and nurses don't even know what sex you are.

If you're male, you can't be pregnant...which means zero care....

Oh FFS! I would feel so insulted!

Isn't that what boats do?

This is an actual issue. If you think it isn't, might I suggest reading a few of the threads on here to see where this ideology leads?

Men in women's prisons
The ruination of women's sports
The sterilisation of children
The list goes on....

This shit is one reason I've not paid the licence fee this year. I watch bugger all TV (and that on Netflix and YouTube) but we'd still paid it for the sake of Radio 4. Then that lost its marbles, various things happened that caused explosive ranting and when the demand came it was filed in the fireplace.

Either the BBC can be an impartial national broadcaster (something I thought was fabulous when we had one), in which case I'll cough up because I'll be switching on, or it can pursue various agendas, in which case it can, as the Scots say, get tae fuck.

I care. I would have shown the door to any midwife who referred to me as a birthing person or tried to advise me on chest feeding.

I was quite interested when the programme came on. Then the midwife started wanging on about 'women and birthing people'. I rolled my eyes and switched off totally. It's a great way to indicate to people that you're utterly thick. It didn't help improve my trust in maternity services, shall we say.

Giving birth is the most female thing you can do!

No time for birthing people here.

ECHR- not EHRC!

The child matters and can't be used as a prop to enforce the parent's fantasies. The child has the legal and human right to have their mother and father correctly acknowledged. This goes back to the original GRA, and has more recently been confirmed in the UK Supreme Court in the Freddy McConnell judgement that confirmed it is also a child welfare issue, which takes precedence over the parent's gender belief or fantasy.

So if a father forces his child or other people to pretend he's their mother, or the mother wants to pretend she is a father, it is a child welfare issue in direct conflict with UK and human rights laws safeguarding children of transitioners.

See section 12 of the GRA, the full UK Freddy McConnell final judgement (still available online), the UN Rights of the Child, and also a recent EHRC judgement about paperwork/ birth records for transpeople and their children.https://childrenoftransitioners.org/2023/04/10/paperwork/

So any NHS worker for example pretending a mother is a father or vice versa needs reporting. It should be no surprise the government stopped funding the NHS Rainbow Badge Scheme in which LGBT groups tried to enforce the gaslighting and emotional abuse of children of transitioners /older siblings involved.

Yet again, somebody who thinks that they can give consent on somebody else's behalf.

The best possible care is patient-centred. 'Julia Smith', not ' The C-section in bed 3'. Julia Smith, a pregnant woman, a mother or mother-to-be.

If Julia does not want to be referred to in ways that recognise her as female, then it is up to her to inform the HCPs caring for her.

WHO CARES. Why not focus your energy on an actual issue. I'm a pregnant person. I could not give two hoots about anything beyond getting the best possible care.

Yes I take your point, but my point is that if you are suffering from gender dysphoria or a serious MH condition the consultants/specialists who will probably diagnose you and treat you do not concern themselves much or at all with women's reproductive health. It's a different discipline. There may be a degree of overlap sometimes, but it general they are separate.

Therefore for obs/gynae/pre and post natal services the focus should be firmly on the physical body, not the mind, unless a woman's state of mind is directly related to her pregnancy or her menopause.

In general, that means dealing in biological fact, not feelings. Ovaries and wombs don't have emotions or feelings or an 'identity.' Whether pregnant or menstruating trans identified people like the words woman or mother being applied to them or not, is beside the point. They are only pregnant or menstruating because they are a woman or an expectant mother.

It’s the old question. Why is it unacceptable to offend transmen, but fine and dandy to offend all the women who are ok with being women?

Women's reproductive health and maternity services deals with physical health, not mental health.

Disagree. Women's mental health is relevant to their overall well-being, and therefore to outcomes for them and their babies.

Issues of belief can be highly relevant - eg certain conditions are more likely among Jewish women, so a patient's Jewish faith may inform the ante natal tests she needs.

But the default should be entirely woman-centred, with relevant differences highlighted and addressed as needed.

I think where the NHS is concerned anything maternity, obs and gynae related should always and only EVER refer to women. It's a simple fact that trans men will often need to avail themselves of those medical/health services purely because they are biologically women, whatever they might like to identify as. I think the NHS is fiddling while Rome burns by spending money, time and energy pandering to a minority ideology. The ONLY thing they should care about is women's reproductive health and and best practice in maternity care. That's all.

Nobody who isn't biologically a woman will be needing any of those services anyway, so within that setting they should just accept the terms woman and mother and live with it. They are free to identify as whatever they like outside of a women's health setting, but within it there should be clear boundaries. Medicine should only ever deal in facts and reality.

Women's reproductive health and maternity services deals with physical health, not mental health. They shouldn't need to concern themselves with issues of gender dysphoria or indeed with the increasing number of people who are not gender dysphoric in the truly clinical sense but merely bandwagon jumping onto the zeitgeist of trans and non-binary ideology.

The problem with birthing people is it actually includes the baby. As babies play an active part in birth. They move and wiggle during birth to assist thier passage out of their mother.

Birthing people includes at least 2 people at every birth.

It wasn't the doctor, I think - they had three on, all women - doctor, midwife and doula. As far as I remember it, the midwife (surely she should call herself a midperson?) was the most kowtowing in her language, the doula almost hesitated after saying 'women' and added hastily 'and people of minoritised genders' I think it was (a new one on me!) and I think the doctor said ... women.

It certainly boiled my piss! I actually turned the radio off. Shame, I've enjoyed what I've heard of this series.

This, in contrast to the eminently sensible Prof Sophie Scott who was on 'All in the Mind' with Claudia Hammond later on on R4 and was discussing an experiment run ON academic psychologists where they got male and female academics to name the 10 academics in their field who first came to mind. Men name almost all men: women tend to name about 50/50 female/male. As she pointed out, this has massive implications for scholarship, recognition, recruitment and all sorts of other things. And Prof Scott consistently said men, women, male, female the entire time.

@SiobhanSharpe Yes, I'm pretty sure it was a doctor as well as the midwife - and, I'd have to listen to it again, but towards the end, I think the presenter used birthing people. Given the rest of the content of this series, I was surprised.

Specifically the topic was oxytocin production being higher when the patient trusts the health professionals and feels listened to.

I wonder how much a labouring woman trusts health professionals who pretend that pregnancy and labour are not uniquely female experiences. I wonder how listened-to a labouring woman feels when the health professionals pretend she is not a woman and a mother.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a pre-show chat in which they discussed the language to use. The BBC has form for this stuff, after all.

It's so awful. It's not just awful because it makes women invisible in an exclusively female arena but it's so weird to have the entire state of being pregnant, nine long and distinct months of carrying a baby be reduced to the act of pushing out the baby at the end. I mean, that's so odd.

Tbf to the BBC it sounds like there's a particular doctor interviewed saying it (going by the OP). Not the BBC themselves.

And wasn’t one of them a doctor?

Quite so!