Please help me articulate why this makes me uneasy...

[HedgeBrown]

...I've floated about on here a little and read a few threads regarding women's rights and censorship. I work in the NHS in Women's health. Our local Maternity Voices Partnership now refer to 'birthing people' in correspondence, social media etc.

I feel like the day is coming when we will be forced to reword our literature in my area to remove the word woman. How best can I put into words how damaging I feel this is? I feel I need to be ready to attack the issue with some intelligent arguments.

"Birthing people" to me means the people around the birth, midwives, doulas, doctors etc. The ones who support the woman giving birth.

Just keep saying "woman" every time someone says something ridiculous which excludes the woman - and point out the exclusion. Only women can give birth after all.

Can you tell I'm getting a bit fed up with the tiptoeing around so-called inclusion and the erasure of actual birth-giving women?

Because it's erasing women and our lived experience.

Have they conducted a survey? If so who did they consult. Giving birth is the most fundamental aspect of being a woman. It can be both dangerous and exhilarating. It is an intensely biological process. Removing the word woman makes quite clear that they are not prepared to unequivocally centre the biological reality of their patients. Their job is to do that. Trans men who give birth should be treated sensitively but they are undergoing a female not male biological process. How can female patients trust medical practioners who do not understand this?
Perhaps they should read 'Invisible Women's- medicine has a pretty poor record in treating women.

It grates because the ability -if everything works- to carry a pregnancy and give birth is a key discriminator of ‘women’ from ‘people’.

If clinicians can’t grasp that basic fact and are happy to alienate thousands of women for a minuscule number of trans men (who have accepted the female role in procreation) - then they are in the wrong job.

Keep at it - I am in the NHS too - Reminding people that sex not gender affects disease incidence, treatment and outcomes. At a push I accept gender can affect behaviour which can impact on some disease incidence/ outcomes I.e smoking rates etc.

Be open and voice your concerns about how this change of term might negatively impact on the women’s engagement. You could use the response to the NHS / charities or removing the word woman from other campaigns - is cervical cancer.

Perhaps you could suggest a ‘pilot survey’ on how women want to be referred as - after all it should be centred on them- I can predict the outcome.

Personally - I think being pregnant is crappy enough without being erased.

Can you reiterate that you're clear they realise language is important hence their inclusiveness for trans people. Then pull out stats highlighting how rare it is and language needs to accommodate and make comfortable the majority service users. The more protracted the language and service set up the more distance you add at a time when full transparency is needed?

How rare it is should have said trans pregnancies.

Because they are making the very word "woman" problematic, and discouraging its use. It is the ability to identify women as a sex class that allows us to point out the discrimination and abuse we are subjected to, and removal of that word as an acceptable one dilutes our ability to name what is happening to women as a sex class. Which makes our provision and protection impossible to enforce.

If we lose the ability to confidently define ourselves as a group, how can we defend our own interests? We can't.

Language needs to be clear for all users including those whose first language isn’t English or whose literacy skills may be limited. Their needs should also be considered.

Plus it just pisses me off but that probably isn’t a helpful thing to add.

Well it just sounds wanky doesn’t it? Woke language for the sake of wokeness is the height of virtue signalling twattery. If you have a patient who prefers to be referred to as the birthing person then of course you should respect their wishes but using birthing people for no reason is just annoying.

I would hope it means - the pregnant women and those folk who are usually around at the birth (dad, their mum, nurses, etc). I fear not though.

This article from Feminist Current addresses the situation in Canada.

I am not sure how much of it resonates in the UK.

I refuse to allow women to be removed from the centre of maternity care. Women deserve self-determination in our own birth experiences. We deserve respect and truly informed consent in maternity care: this is not just a slogan or something silly — to be ridiculed — but a right. We have work to do, as women, to regain and retain the means of human reproduction.

www.feministcurrent.com/2020/01/20/using-gender-neutral-language-regarding-women-and-childbirth-is-about-more-than-semantics/

I should add - A previous responder is correct - A midwife / doula etc could describe themselves as a ‘birthing person’.

Literature needs to be clear and precise and cater to everyone - inc those with English as a second language etc. Health literacy in this county is very low. Women is accurate - have they had any complaints?

'Birthing people' is awful! I would feel seriously insulted by that. But then what do I, a mere woman, matter?

There's a lovey thing that's been going around fb for a couple of years about how when a child is born, a mother is also born and how societies in the past revered the mother etc.

Birthing person feels even more defacing what it is to be both female and a mother.

It's the pinnacle of a woman's biology.

Its a similar process to what I heard recently during a a conversation two friends were having at a party around, making maternity leave more flexible for the father etc. Which is great, but I found myself trying to remind them that it's necessary to support recovery etc while one described a couple they knew who both took leave together and went travelling for 4 months.

Which sounds lovely and maybe it was as they were both there to share the burden, but I feel it both erases the mother, her biology and makes people view maternity leave like a holiday. Both of mine have been the hardest thing I've done physically (sections, breastfeeding) and I've been very grateful to be able to have them.

But any sniff of "you're off" has been met with a tiger's roar!

Yeah, agree with above that biology is (the only thing) that provides a difference between men and women and it's the biology of reproduction

Women's rights and feminism to me are about accepting women as individuals whilst respecting their biology and the effects that has...be it designing safety gear that fits or understanding heart attack symptoms. And giving birth rather than impregnating is kind of key there

Perhaps you would like them to explain how they would describe the differences in Male and female heart attack symptoms whilst using similar sex neutral vocabulary?

The blatant misogyny and double standards.

'Transwomen': Do not call us 'male people', even if that is accurate per all accepted definitions. Call us what we insist upon being called. Centre OUR wishes.
NHS: Of course.

Women: Do not call us 'birthing people' - we are women. Centre our wishes.
NHS: NO. We're still centreing the wishes of the non-birthing people who've told us what to call you.

Birthing people means staff attending the birth!

Do they mean women having babies? No wonder it makes uncomfortable, it makes a nonsense of language.

It's an oddity - because what you do by replacing 'woman' with 'birthing person' is both reduce the woman involved to the functional physicality of her role in the process, and you make her nondescript, impersonal.

It's like if you went around calling everyone human, but qualified it only by also describing what activity they were doing.

To call someone a 'person' is ok, but when you couple it with an activity, it becomes strangely dehumanizing.

So if you talked about a woman at the till of a shop as a 'till person', you would be defining her whole existence via the function, therefore diminishing her humanity.

You can try it with anything - it has a limiting effect, especially in medical things. For me, it's why I don't understand 'they' as a singular ongoing pronoun. It is fine when the person in question is still theoretical, or the specifics of the individual haven't been determined.

But to persist in this very general terminology, even when you have determined that the person in question is doing something that can only be done by one sex, and it's therefore courteous to begin to be specific in your language, is extremely rude.

I'm not a native speaker and would never understand this term as referring to a pregnant woman. And if someone had explained to me that this impersonal, general term was being used to address me, I would have felt disrespected as a woman and mother-to-be.

One of the most wonderful moments in my first pregnancy was when a HCP referred to me as a mother for the first time. It made it real to me that there was going to be this whole new person and I would be the one it would depend on.

Probably sounds sentimental and inconsequential in light of all this dehumanising language that seeks to make women (and mothers especially) invisible again, but it was a precious moment in time I still remember decades later.

"Our local Maternity Voices Partnership now refer to 'birthing people' in correspondence, social media etc."

The irony! "Maternity Voices"!

Odd example of usage in the definition of maternity below but otherwise makes the meaning plain:

maternity | məˈtəːnɪti |
noun [mass noun]
motherhood: she is not a woman with an interest in maternity.
• [usually as modifier] the period during pregnancy and shortly after childbirth: maternity clothes.

ORIGIN
early 17th century: from French maternité, from Latin maternus, from mater ‘mother’.

I agree with previous posters - I would assume "Birthing person" to mean anyone other than the mother involved with the birth.

This sort of bizarre language is confusing enough if English is your first language and you have a reasonable level of literacy. The aim should be to communicate effectively and think about "hard to reach" groups - not alienate and confuse your target audience.

"How to write medical information in plain English" - Plain English Campaign

Ten tips for clearer writing

1. Think of your audience, not yourself.

Don't try to impress people by using your language to show off: keep it as straightforward as possible. Imagine you are speaking to someone, and write in that more relaxed way.

8. Use everyday words.

Big words, foreign phrases, bursts of Latin and so on usually confuse people. Consequently, it is a sine qua non of plain English not to write too polysyllabically! So, for plain English, use everyday words.

Download guide: www.plainenglish.co.uk/files/medicalguide.pdf

• - - - -

Plain English Awards 2019 include NHS Scotland ‘Ready Steady Baby!’
www.plainenglish.co.uk/campaigning/awards/2019-awards/plain-english-awards.html

Maybe you could suggest that the local "Maternity Voices Partnership" prepare info to a standard that might result in them winning an award from the Plain English Campaign?

• - - - -

For a bit of light relief - the Plain English Campaign "Gobbledygook Generator"
www.plainenglish.co.uk/gobbledygook-generator.html

That’s ridiculous. Suggests that the “birthing person” could be a woman or man. ThinEndoftheWedge is spot on.
I’d have been furious if they had referred to me as a birthing person in hospital. It’s insulting.
Do oncologists have to say “people with prostate / testicular cancer” yet or are they still allowed to say the word man?

“ Suggests that the “birthing person” could be a woman or man”

Exactly why they’re doing it.

In a previous existence I won an award for health writing. Clarity and accessibility are key to effective communication in this area.

This nonsense is shameful: whoever wrote it deliberately ignored all the principles of health communication - principles with which they were presumably all too familiar. I am really quite angry with them.

@Poota is correct.

It dehumanises the woman to a function / activity.

We used to say ‘the blind’ ‘ the deaf’ now we say the blind person’ ‘the deaf community’. There is a person/community attached to sight/hearing loss.

You might refer (inappropriately) to a colleague as ‘the broken leg in bay 3’ but you wouldn’t say that directly to the patient or write it in the literature. Why is it allowed here?

Woman = whole human being

Would you be allowed to say that women have given you feedback that they find being referred to as "birthing people" extremely dehumanising? Because I am a woman and I do.