Birthing People

[lafemme]

My local hospital trust have just posted this on their social media. (Photo attached)

Disappointed they've used the term 'birthing people' for a process that is exclusively experienced by women. A medical setting seems like a bizarre place to conflate language.

For the purposes of this poster I'd consider myself a woman in labour not a birthing person. Motherhood is not up for grabs.

I scribble out gender and write sex on every single paper form I have to fill in.
If it is online, I tick " prefer not to say". If there is a comments section I write a strongly worded comment.
This infuriates me.
I was a midwife for many years.
I worked in medical research for even more years.
Sex is very, very important.

Disgusting, dehumanising language.

My FEMALE body went through pregnancy and birth.

Not a clue what a birthing people are

It’s just idiots dehumanising women.

How dare they be so rude

The Trust where I gave birth is now using 'women and birthing people', which I'm fairly OK with all things considered. Not happy when 'women' or 'mother' gets erased though. Maybe contact them and suggest 'women and birthing people'?

I would interpret that poster as meaning that the woman and her helper are both meant to be mobile!

Can’t find the post. Doesn’t seem to be on their fb page.

The policy is fine though. Women is used first, and is the default.

I'm just so baffled that a maternity service can't utter the word woman! It's disgraceful.

A hero made a comment on the page and they have acknowledged it and changed the post.

Women are an afterthought but at least we are no longer excluded from our own labours

Why even use it though? "If you're giving birth, we encourage you to..." would work perfectly fine.

There's no need to 'take sides' at all in this stuff.

In order to be a Stonewall Champion you have to tick a set of boxes to get a score in a whole host of ideologically driven contexts / activities. One of them is 'using gender-neutral language'. So this erasure of women is a direct and intended outcome.

Extraordinary that the possible but highly unlikely offence caused by calling a pregnant transman a 'woman' or 'mother', or mentioning 'breastfeeding', trumps the offence and distress caused to the 99.98% of pregnant women who know they are women.

Well it would be extraordinary if we didn't know that the people behind this totalitarian control of language are men. Andrea Dworkin spotted it decades ago: "As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect.”

Ah so it's that. Christ.

Remember when Stonewall was a real proper champion for gay and lesbian rights, before it went mad needing the next big issue and started chasing trans funding?

Who would have ever thought they'd be the bad guys?

Indeed. Who'd have thought... Ditto Amnesty, Liberty, Green Party, UN Women, EHRC, Fawcett Society... and the whole sorry lot of them.

gardenbird48 and endofthelinefinally
I have to do daily home coronavirus tests before work and record the results online - the hospital uses a survey monkey link for the purpose. I assume it is anonymised but there is plenty of identifying information requested so I'm not sure.
Anyway about the first question is "Gender". Each time I record "other" and in the free text box type "sex = female".
A couple of times I've had a mini rant in the final "comments" free text box. The last time I verbalised my rant as I typed and a couple of colleagues looked a bit bemused - they obviously haven't caught up.
My rant pointed out that my Covid risk assessment, which starts with my age, then deducts 5 (years) for being female would be materially incorrect if I identified as male and would put me in a higher risk category.
It's driving me mad.
I wonder how many rants will trigger an interview with HR?

That particular Trust has done amazing work with women from the travelling community, I am surprised they mistepped here, pleased to see it put right.

Cornish maternity services are pretty far gone on gender ideology as I understand it. It really is particularly sad that midwives of all people have become genderists. Midwifery above all professions, ought to be about defending women and upholding our rights.

In fact I think obstetricians and the RCOG are managing better but the RCM is affiliated to Unison I believe so perhaps less autonomous.

FannyCann - that’s what I do! I was going to join a cookery Facebook group and saw the red mist. They never did let me join... so I ended up in another group that just said something like before nice, don’t make nasty comments about other people or their recipes/food pics’ - so the first group chose to go down the gender nonsense route (on a cooking group).

@DaisiesandButtercups interesting point. Do you think this comes from midwives though? I would have thought this is dictated from above and most midwives are just getting on and giving wonderful support to women.

@endofthelinefinally

I scribble out gender and write sex on every single paper form I have to fill in. If it is online, I tick " prefer not to say". If there is a comments section I write a strongly worded comment. This infuriates me. I was a midwife for many years. I worked in medical research for even more years. Sex is very, very important.

I’m a student midwife surrounded by a whole bunch of very woke colleagues. My small act of rebellion is that I always write new baby namebands if the previous midwife has written GENDER: F to SEX: F.

I think what’s frustrating is how there are a lot of problems with the culture of maternity care and giving birth for women- women routinely patronised, infantilised, not having a say or making decisions about their own body, a lack of informed consent, violations, high numbers of women left traumatised from poor or degrading care in labour.

It’s not talked about enough yet we are now seeing (in my opinion) quite a strong drive to make language gender-inclusive with many loud voices and changes actively taking place. Why isn’t there the same drive and passion to improve informed consent in labour and birth? Or to reduce the rate of birth trauma?

@ciderfromalemon you are absolutely right, women aren't being put at the centre of maternity care. Why are unimportant, offensive and exclusive agendas eclipsing the needs of women?

I'm copying my post from the other thread, sorry for being lazy.

The Call the Midwife Christmas special included a section with a woman who had suffered seven miscarriages and was very fearful approaching her birth. The midwife said to her "you are a mother, and you have been for many years". It was lovely and I hope SANDSUK took note.

It's incredibly important to hang on to our language. I am fearful that the future will see a downgrading of maternity pay, perhaps there might be 2-4 weeks gestational leave for birthing parents to recover and parental leave for everyone else to include adoption leave and new parents of babies acquired through surrogacy.

Women and babies will be the losers.

An old midwife saying - it takes nine months to make a baby and nine months to recover. Of course many if not most women will feel well recovered before then, but there is a lot going on internally like restoring iron stores (you can have a normal Hb and still have low ferritin levels, this will make a woman more vulnerable to anaemia in her next pregnancy until ferritin levels are back to normal), and ligaments and pelvic floor muscles regaining strength as well as mothers who are still breastfeeding and need to maintain a good diet and plenty of rest if possible.

ToesAndFingersCrossed

Well done.

It must be very difficult to be a student midwife surrounded by all this. Those small acts of rebellion really matter.

Also what ciderfromalemon said.

I think a lot of it rests on Stonewall and their faulty suicide myths.

Women after difficult births haven't grouped into a charity and branded a collective identity which says over and over again that they'll all kill themselves if the NHS doesn't do what they want. Instead they tend to struggle on in isolation or make formal individual complaints, you know, like women are socialised to do.

(I'm not saying that emotional blackmail is the way to go mind you, just pointing out the different approaches.)

[quote lafemme]@DaisiesandButtercups interesting point. Do you think this comes from midwives though? I would have thought this is dictated from above and most midwives are just getting on and giving wonderful support to women. [/quote]
There is a Cornish midwife on Twitter who is full on TMAM, “intersectional” feminist.

Yes like with the breastfeeding groups a small number of very vocal women who perhaps for reasons related to their own internalised inferiority and (not unreasonable) subconscious fears are pushing this agenda through. These women I believe have suffered in some way which remains unaddressed. Their tendency is towards appeasement and avoidance of conflict. Their actions are preemptive submission. Their colleagues may be baffled, confused and also concerned about the repercussions of challenging the ideology given that it is backed up at a higher level. This ideology has has caught many on the back foot.

Yes many midwives and breastfeeding counsellors, the majority I would imagine are continuing to do their best for mothers and babies despite what is going on.

I would be surprised if you will find the same thing happening on urology wards as is happening in maternity and breastfeeding.

Yet another thread denying the fact that women are also people.