Action from New Zealand MNers: the word mother is to be removed from Midwifery Council Practice Guidelines. Write to make your voice heard.

[Watchthesunrise]

New Zealand has to be the most bonkers place on the planet. We seem to love embracing magical meaningless words. This time, it's removing the words mother or mama from practice guidelines and replacing them with whanau. Let's magically pretend that the entire family group has potential to suffer tears, prolapses, depression, pregnancy shame and breastfeeding difficulties shall we. And let the erasure continue.

The final revision of the scope of practice guidelines is currently available for comment until November 21.

Please write to keep the midwifery profession a proud bastion of feminism. [email protected]

Stuff story

I am AMAZED this has been published on Stuff. I will try and find time to read the guidelines. I can understand that there may be good reason to use the word whānau in certain places, as long as women/wāhine remain at the heart of midwifery practice.

I agree @MauisLeftNipple . No objections to the use of whanau in the document, but I do have an objection to no use of the word women or mother.

The guidelines are short and easily digested, don't let that put you off submitting if you want to.

I found the tweet, they'd posted it (with the article attached) in Maori. Fair number of comments, mostly unsupportive.

From the comments it appears only a small minority can speak the language. From the article it seems it's not a straight translation. Whanau seems to have dimensions that woman or mother do not. I'm surprised there's only one Maori language esp. considering NZ's geography.

I don't know if Maori is being used as a cat's paw, but it seems dishonest and NZ appears pretty captured.

twitter.com/NZStuff/status/1589474375841230848?s=20&t=LGMj1Oo_es_-LfNJ0_GAKA