Another hospital dehumanises women - ‘ birthing parents ‘

Is it much different to 30 odd years ago when "right on" midwives replaced husband with partner and refused to call women Mrs in case it offended unmarried mothers. Absolutely fine if they had called the obstetricians Robin and John but they got pissed off when I rubbed out Mr x and Mr y and put their first names. I just thought it was equality. Can't do right for doing wrong.

Always been a funny old world in hospitals. Time to put our feet down.

I see all this irrelevant noise as directly contributing to our current appalling state of maternity care. Nobody - not transactivists, DEI staff in hospitals or useful idiots in politics - should be diverting maternity staff from focusing on the welfare of women and babies.
Countless enquiries have highlighted the problems, many of which are systematic, about professional hierarchies, being in the grip of ideologies (natural birth at all costs) and of course inadequate resources.
Nobody should be diverting a single hour of staff time with irrelevancies - especially if they're niche luxury demands that get in the way of accurate language, data collection and insult women and mothers.
There should only be one priority in all maternity units at present and that's to eradicate the current dangerous practices and provide safe care for women and babies.

Well hold on a second - in my day (when working in hospitals) the most important person (in the good hospitals) was the patient.

When business school graduates and CEOs took over the running of hospitals the emphasis shifted, even in the previously good hospitals, from the patient to other areas.

Language mirrors the shifts.

In maternity care, the focus, by far, should be on woman (or birthing woman if preferred) and baby - not people and not parents.

That should come later, when the baby is born, and mother and child are discharged.

If it was, perhaps our numbers would not be so shameful.

The health outcome is probably because they don't use the word woman

😂 because before gender ideology, maternity care was fan-fucking-tastic ?(no it wasn’t).

We are almost our own worst enemy when comments like this are made.

‘Important research into ‘families, birthing people and babies’ this is a Trust with terrible reputation for midwives and maternity services and they can’t even use the word ‘women’

The health outcome is probably because they don't use the word woman - it reveals what the health service is about, and what it is not about.

I am going to presume you’re agreeing with me and some of what you said was to another poster because none of it makes sense in relation to what I have posted.

like it or not some people are going to make everything very ugly if they are not accommodated in some way.

Also birthing parent can apply in a same sex relationship - where they will both be the mum, so i really don't object to it overmuch. Then of course there are the NBs and the transmen but i really try not to pay them too much mind because otherwise my BP will shoot up.

You can not de-sex the language when you are talking about something which only one sex can do. Only women, females, mothers can give birth. This is an area which requires sexed language.

Comparing this with chairman, fisherman, etc - roles which can be done by people of either sex - is disingenuos.

I swither on this to be honest. "Birthing parent" is not good, but actually, "women and other birthing parents" would make me roll my eyes even more, as it is making an explicit statement that some people who give birth are not women, and I disagree.

That's very heartening. Yes I can imagine it would be extremely difficult to override a natural language instinct. I wonder if your trust's approach is the norm or an outlier, maybe it is only a few captured trusts that are still trying to push this thing?

i am ok with "women and other birthing parents" if we have to have that.

Anything else makes me Very Cross Indeed.

My Friends’s sister works in a maternity linked service - all patients are female - and bit by bit the language is being chipped away at. ‘Birthing people’ etc. I think it’s awful and would have been very upset to be reduced to a body part / body function during my baby’s birth. Especially as I felt
it don’t go so well.

On the one hand we are saving that medical research for women is totally absent, and on the other hand we are dropping woman/mother from female-only experiences. The world has gone mad.

Yes I agree. In addition, I think it is actively dangerous to de-sex language in a medical setting because we are so biologically different.

There is a use which is perfectly reasonable, imo- where there are two mums. It saves a lot of ‘no, not you Mum, you Mum!’.
Birthing mum, birthing woman, birthing parent might be useful in those circumstances and should come readily to the tongue when needed.

And with the exception of job-related terms (chairperson, actor, fisher etc) the language getting desexed is primarily that relating to women. We are people with cervixes, people who menstruate, birthing parents. Men with prostate cancer etc remain men. The proponents of this nonsense want to oppress women and deny their experiences.

Agree, this is de-sexing of the language that is being misused because only we of the female sex (women and teen girls) can give birth.

I think it's dehumanising despite a "person" being human. Just because other terms might be more dehumanising, it doesn't mean this term is not.

”Birthing parent” instead of “birthing woman” doesn’t meet the basic requirement for dehumanising language which is that the term used must erase any reference to a human, often reducing a human to an animal.

Examples of dehumanising language used in the past: parasites, cockroaches, rats, pig, breeders, scroungers, spazzos, bitch, infestation, etc

Desexing language is for stopping the assumption of the default male. I'm the kind of idiot who persists in saying "green person" and "bin person" despite never having seen a female bin man person in my life.

But giving birth is a specifically sexed activity, regardless of fashion or opinion.

And having done this activity twice, how the fuck anyone can think of their identity when they've thrown their clothing off and are roaring I don't know!

Birthing woman vs birthing parent is not dehumanising.
The argument it is reducing us to a bodily function is incorrect.
It would be correct if birthing woman at been changed to breeder or birther

Swapping woman (adult female human) for parent (human with at least one child) cannot be dehumanising.

It’s problematic, yes, it should stay birthing woman, yes, but to say it is dehumanising is a spurious claim that is just as problematic for those who are actually subjected to dehumanising language.

Yes? And? Do you know of anyone who has a parent that is not human?

But only one parent gives birth and that is always the female parent.

Very well put. I always like to remind people of Dr Suzanne Forbes-Vierling's talk on the racist origins of gender-neutral language:

Reducing us to our reproductive function strips away the dignity of being a woman. Let’s face it, we give so much of ourselves to others and when we are pregnant or raising little children we don’t often have much dignity. Let us have the title ‘woman’ which is rich in meaning and carries all of the literary and historical contexts to our sex. Don’t just reduce us to our reproductive organs.

It’s just not a thing. It has never been mentioned in either direction, and rightly so. In a profession where we literally deal with biggest thing a female body can do, they’ll have a job getting me to say birthing people. I would obviously do my best if caring for somebody who identifies as male, but as I found, it’s very hard to override nature

All of us connected to our grandmothers like this, stretching back through time. A small female truth that isn't declared with a name and can't be influenced by money or violence. What did those mothers of the past have to endure to bring the lives into this world that eventually became your life?

That's such a profound way of putting it @InconvenientlyMaterial it brought tears to my eyes.
The female connection 💜