SANDS sorry if upsetting

[InTheShadowOfTheMushroomCloud]

I have no words. This has upset me so much...

Janice Turner has nailed it as ever. Selling female invisibility as progress.

@Awning10

As someone who has needed support from SANDS in the past, I feel compelled to come to their defence. They may have made an error of judgement in this tweet but they have been there to support thousands of women at the lowest point imaginable. They are a charity that supports grieving parents - predominantly mothers. They know what a mother is and what it means. Please go easy on them.

I agree, here. This may have been badly phrased and badly thought-through, but SANDS do much to support mothers.

And to you, Awning.

That twitter thread is so moving. Shame on the thoughtless person at SANDS who thought it OK to remove the word mother just to pander to the bullies. So much pain caused to women.

@Clymene

They are a great charity but they need to prioritise the feelings of the women they're supporting and not throw them under the bus to get woke cookies from a group of people who probably have zero interest in this.

I have a sister whose had 2 baby losses. Calling a grieving mother a 'birthing parent' is reducing women to being milking cows and those words were despicable and disgusting

She tried to post information about this to a UK Facebook group called The Mummy Gin Fund and the post was blocked. Mummy websites blocking posts about the word mother being erased..

Birthing parent?

I don’t know if I qualify. I was unconscious when they tried to save my baby first time round. Me the second.

I never ‘birthed’. But despite never hearing them cry, I was, and consider myself to be, a mother.

Some may dispute that. I grew little babies. I was their mam.

I was a MOTHER. I just don’t have holdable children.

I agree, here. This may have been badly phrased and badly thought-through, but SANDS do much to support mothers.

Hopefully they’ll listen and learn from it.

Link to feedback form, for anyone who feels they did get it wrong here:

sands.org.uk/about-sands/who-we-are/tell-us-what-you-think

@Awning10

SANDS are amazing. They know what a mother is. They couldn't want to take that word away from a mother. It cannot be part of their ethos.

Despite the trauma and upset caused, they have not taken it back, apologised or deleted the tweet. And they’ve been on their account today.

🤷🏼‍♀️

They should apologise for the hurt they have caused

Made me cry.

To my older sister born too soon

To my mum and my dad . 💐💐💐

b*rowndog
*
Am so very sorry. Flowers to you and all your family x

Having had two stillbirths and a miscarriage at 19 weeks, I don’t give two figs whether I am called the mother or the birth parent. My husband felt incredible pain and sorrow too. He didn’t give birth. He is a non-birthing parent.
What matters is that people going through perinatal loss receive the support they need. When our were born there was no support really. A few sad words and home we went.
I don’t believe en can become women but I think if anyone who identifies as anything loses their child, they are entitled to kindness and freedom from hostility over words. If that mother happens to prefer to wear a beard and boxer shorts, who is that hurting?

There is a time to battle over the rights of women and safe women only spaces. In the bereavement suite of a maternity unit is not that place.

stillsomewhat, you are a mother, of course you are

Awning10, they have indeed been ratio'd on that tweet but there is no glee here about that and I don't think anyone wants to attack or cancel Sands about it. The error of judgment here has the whiff of their hand being guided. It's no coincidence how many organizations around women's experiences and needs have gone down the erasure of women-centred language recently. I fully expect to read accounts in a couple of years time of how the under-the-radar approach that paid dividends in legislative matters was also extremely systematically applied to the charity sector. Basically, the proponents of inclusivity (at the expense of women) have likely been going into charities and saying "Hmm, it'd be terrible if you got piled on on social media for using old-fashioned language. Here, let us re-write that for you so you don't accidentally cause offence".

I think we need a women-centred language group to review and offer advice so other charities doing truly excellent work, like Sands, can be spared this, to be honest.

@iVampire

You are misrepresenting the organisation

Even the most cursory look at the website shows the terms mother and father mum and dad are by far the most frequently used.

Why different on this page? Because some babies have two mothers and when talking support for partners it’s quite important not to leave confusion about which mother you are talking about or inadvertently leave the impression that the non-birthing one is somehow lesser, or need to use even more to avoid that. Yes, lesbian couples are less common that heterosexual parents, and surrogate arrangements even rarer. But they exist, whether you like it or not, and on a page which is clearly meant to cover all permutations of parent it’s appropriate to use inclusive language

Some babies having two mothers is a fairly bizarre reason to avoid using the word Mother Am I missing something?

Every baby has at least one mother, so it's always appropriate to use the word mother. I don't mind at all their also using language that, say, trans men who have given birth feel comfortable with, along with the partners or the baby's other parent.

@CherryPavlova

Having had two stillbirths and a miscarriage at 19 weeks, I don’t give two figs whether I am called the mother or the birth parent. My husband felt incredible pain and sorrow too. He didn’t give birth. He is a non-birthing parent. What matters is that people going through perinatal loss receive the support they need. When our were born there was no support really. A few sad words and home we went. I don’t believe en can become women but I think if anyone who identifies as anything loses their child, they are entitled to kindness and freedom from hostility over words. If that mother happens to prefer to wear a beard and boxer shorts, who is that hurting? There is a time to battle over the rights of women and safe women only spaces. In the bereavement suite of a maternity unit is not that place.

Whatever that woman chooses to wear, she is the child's mother.

The concerted attempt to decouple the words woman and mother from female biological reality is neither benign nor accidental

And to you and all of us who have lost our babies.

@stillsomewhatsheldonesque of course you qualify. You're their mam. ---- for you and all the babies we didn't get to meet.

CherryPavlova I'm truly sorry for your losses, and of course they were your husband's painful, heart wrenching losses too. The fact that you don't mind not being referred to as the mother in your losses is your decision, your choice, your right. What isn't your right is to give away the term "mother" from other women for whom it is incredibly important. My loss came after I had live children, so I was already a "mother". Many thought that made it less painful for me. I don't believe it did. What I had as an advantage over mothers and fathers who didn't have any live children was a reason to get up in the morning and carry on with life. I will always grieve the child I didn't get to hold and see grow, but I had to concentrate my strength on the children I had that needed their mum (and dad). Sands post just had to say mothers instead of birthing parent, the rest of the tweet would have been OK. I think we all acknowledge that dads, lesbian non-birth mums, dads who needed a stand-in sperm donor, siblings and wider family all grieve the loss of a child and need support.

I feel this is erasure rather than progress. Yes families come in all different formations and we need to express the brilliance of that diversity. But This is lumping us as a sort of featureless, remote, corporate jargon blob of ‘people’.

Why not just say we’re here to support both parents? Families in all forms?

I am a bereaved parent, of a young child. Losing a child is the most devastating experience that could happen imho. I am most definitely my little boys mother, and I’m so glad I didn’t run across this early in my grief. After childloss, we are so fragile, the slightest thing can pull the rug out from under us. I’d have been gutted to be on the receiving end of this.

Goodness me, I was so upset that my then DH and family didn't acknowledge my first Mother's Day after my DD died without having to contemplate this.
Gender & sex aren't the same thing.
Women, biologically, are the ones that can get pregnant, carry babies and go through all of the hormonal & physical stuff that accompanies it.
It doesn't matter how you identify, pregnancy is most definitely a woman thing.

Despite the trauma and upset caused, they have not taken it back, apologised or deleted the tweet. And they’ve been on their account today.

It’s the weekend. Isn’t it always? Perhaps that’s another tactic.

But it’s possible that the social media person that runs the Twitter account is not representative of those who care for bereaved mothers. Hopefully on Monday, there may be reaction. I can’t imagine any normal, rational, sympathetic person reading that thread and remaining unmoved.

They’ve responded

twitter.com/sandsuk/status/1320255460356784130?s=21 “We are so sorry that this tweet has upset some people. Our tweet should have included the word mothers. It was an error and we apologise from the bottom of our hearts. Sands is here for everyone.”

Good for them. The tweet’s still up though.

"Some people" is condescendingly almost hateful to the many many mothers who protested at this and "here for everyone" is a passive aggressive way to say they won't stop using inclusive language.

I think it was a man who wrote this apology.

I agree ncGCfeminist

They’ve used the word sorry but it’s clear they don’t really think they’ve done anything wrong.

Ok it's the weekend but that it takes almost a thousand replies, many from their core clientele of bereaved mothers, says they didn't feel they could easily recant or correct themselves early on. They thought they had to go with the so-called inclusive language until the outcry became too big to ignore.