Black birthing people

[OverMoon]

I’ve just seen a post on instagram stating that “Black birthing people are still dying”. I had to do a double-take. Birthing people?

Black women dying in childbirth at a higher rate that women from other backgrounds is obviously a huge issue in the UK that needs attention, and thankfully seems to be gaining more attention recently. But how is it helpful to use language that makes literally no sense!?

A quick twitter search of “black birthing people” shows that lots of other people are using this phrase too.

I am genuinely not against trans inclusivity where it makes sense, but how many trans men choose to get pregnant and give birth? Given they have gender dysphoria and are usually on hormones that would preclude that. Surely the numbers must be vanishingly small?

Doesn’t saying “black birthing people” ignore the fact that it is BLACK WOMEN, a doubly marginalised group, who are affected by this issue? It is misogyny and racism that is causing this. But we can’t say women?

What’s a “birthing person”!? The instagram post features the sentence “The energy you’re given to George Floyd, give to Black Birthing people too”. Am I the only one that finds this so untruthful and distracting from the real issue?

Exactly, it becomes "these things are happening to this group of people who we can't clearly describe, for reasons that we can't explain because that might involve offensive concepts".

The USA is a very different country - why do we have to import their problems - there are 1.5 guns for every person ( or thereabouts - I cant be bothered to look) but if that was the case here life would be very different. Black people are blatantly disadvantaged.

Here to stoke up trouble? It's a feminist board still? Do we gloss over the cognitive dissonance of demands to dehumanise pregnant black women on behalf of a violent abuser? OK then.

Bringing up Floyd is completely off topic though.

It's literally in the opening post. It says do it for Floyd.

@fantaora I just used that sentence as an example of how awkward “birthing people” sounds in a sentence. I wish I’d chosen a different sentence as an example now.

This thread is not meant to be about Floyd. It’s about the phrase “black birthing people” being used in the place of “black women”, and how that might impede on discussions about women’s health.

This convoluted language only serves to obscure the issue. We know that the maternal mortality rate is too high in the UK generally, but X5 higher in black women than white. That's urgent and serious.

Dressing the message up in clumsy, confusing phrases doesn't help: it hinders communication. Like may PPs, I initially assumed "birthing people" meant midwives and doulas!

I'm all for inclusion, so why not just say pregnant black women and trans-men?

Black women are pregnant for 9 months.

Their health inequalities arise way before the 9 months start, continue throughout the 9 months and continue beyond.

Black women spend only a fraction of their time pregnant actually giving birth.

So are they just concerned about the short duration at the end of pregnancy and labour when the child is actually birthed - ie pushed out of the mothers body?

What about the rest of the time that impact on black women’s maternal outcomes?

These don’t count - because then you couldn’t use the term ‘black birth people’ and you might realise you need to use the correct term - black women.

Clearly they don’t give a shit.

It's ridiculous. In forcing the word "women" to be inclusive of people who weren't born women, it's made the word unusable in so many circumstances.

It's difficult that the word woman isn't inclusive of transmen, yet transwomen want to word woman applied to them. But if woman is offensive to TM and shouldn't be used this leads to 'transwomen are birthing people/uterus havers' etc except of course they aren't.
So TW are people? TM are people? Women are people? Men are people? But then you need to get specific in some scenarios as in 'people who give birth, people with prostates' and you end up slap bang into sex based differences again. Which we have very good words for. It's crazy.

The problem when you start misusing language is the lack of clarity. Do they mean mothers, midwives or obstetricians?

We need JKR here to help us guess the word that might help us out.

Surely that's 'birthing persons of colour' instead of 'black mums'?w

When did language become so problematical?

Out of curiosity... we have had trans men give birth. Have we seen any black trans men give birth? How many people are we talking about here worldwide?

@SittingAround1

Transmen can get pregnant but men can't. So to be accurate, instead of erasing women they should refer to 'pregnant women and transmen' .

Sounds logical but unfortunately they won't be satisfied with that as they'll say what about the non binary etc.

“Black Birthing Person” I would say is a description of someone who helps at a birth from doctor to midwife to nurse to birthing partner. That they are dying because they helped at a birth which misses the point spectacularly.

I think it is quite a misleading description.
It is falling over itself to be so inclusive that it comes across as something altogether different that doesn’t actually include the women it is meant to be about.

That's just crazy. There could be language differences for bame women. Using fuzzy words instead of clear meanings could contribute to the high mortality rates!

"Black birthing people" sounds awful on many levels. Do these people not realise how they sound?

Actually since we are going this route... I remember reading about a person who decided that they were trans - family and work supported them etc - then decided that actually they weren’t, but what they actually were was... (wait for it)... an alien of neither sex.

Now if they got pregnant (I can’t remember their bio sex) they you couldn’t call them a ‘green birthing person’ could you?

I agree that 'women, transmen and non-binary people' is cumbersome however, it is so very important in getting the humanity back into our communications.

I always keep saying, you have to communicate to people who might have a limited understanding through language or development, or just plan old too stressed / scanning for time to read behind the words. Some days I would scan over something like that.

And really, this is such an important topic that is getting a fraction of the attention it needs. It does not need obscuring any further through dehumanising language.

(Oh and they were very miffed that their family - after ‘supporting them on their trans journey’ - threw up their collective hands and said ‘oh for the love of Christ!’ when they announced they were an alien.)

Even at the most generous stretch ‘birthing person’ sounds like it refers only to the pushing/crowning stage and nothing about pregnancy or early stage labour, both of which are important when talking about maternal death rates. Leaving out the woman part and the pregnant part is as stupid as leaving out the black part when specifically talking about what leads to a higher death rate amongst black pregnant women and black post partum mothers.

TRA are making it harder to talk about what needs to be done to prevent this, and thus making it harder to solve.

This kind of activism causes material harm to vulnerable groups.

"Birthing people" seems to be increasingly standard these days, I've seen it on NHS communication too. At the very least say "birthing women and people". I was never more aware of the physical and social reality of being a woman, an adult human female, than when pregnant and birthing.

Nobody who gives a shit about people who give birth would freely use the phrase 'birthing people'.

So what about all the other stages...

Conceiving people,
Gestating people,
miscarrying people,
Post birthing people??

Even animals are called calving cows, lambing ewes, farrowing sows and whelping bitches

@ThinEndoftheWedge

Black women are pregnant for 9 months.

Their health inequalities arise way before the 9 months start, continue throughout the 9 months and continue beyond.

Black women spend only a fraction of their time pregnant actually giving birth.

So are they just concerned about the short duration at the end of pregnancy and labour when the child is actually birthed - ie pushed out of the mothers body?

What about the rest of the time that impact on black women’s maternal outcomes?

These don’t count - because then you couldn’t use the term ‘black birth people’ and you might realise you need to use the correct term - black women.

Clearly they don’t give a shit.

There are two main ways the data is complied. One is birth itself to 42 days postpartum (generally known as maternal mortality) and the other way of collecting the data is known as pregnancy-related deaths and starts from beginning of pregnancy to one year after.

There is a problem when the names of that data is switched, in terms of comparison, but both are concerned with more than the relatively short time of labour/birth.

The disparities between ethnicities has been widely available in the US for years while it's only more recently been made known in the U.K. (I reckon on the back of realising what it was in the US). It's unacceptable in either country but the fact that it's just been easily available for anybody to see in the US, long before Serena Williams' experience and subsequent research, highlights how little women with black skin are valued in the US.

The advantage that the UK potentially has us that there are national systems that could be used to address the multiple causes of this if there was will.

I honestly don't see how it can be addressed properly in the US without massive structural overhaul - revolutionary levels.

It's awful.

Anyway, I'm going away from the topic if the thread. It's something I've felt strongly about for a long time. There are issues with breastfeeding and race too - although I don't know that data so well. Bottom line is essentially that women can't be trusted to give birth and black women don't even exist enough as individuals to elicit even that lack of trust.