The campaign for more vagueness
The move to delete women continues.
Federal health chiefs [in Australia] have rewritten a Covid-19 vaccination pregnancy guide that bizarrely erases all mention of ‘women’ and replaces it with ‘pregnant people’.
The guide was originally published in February as ‘COVID-19 vaccination – Shared decision making guide for women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning pregnancy’.
But it was republished last week under its new subtly-tweaked title: ‘COVID-19 vaccination decision guide for people who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning pregnancy’.
Which is not only insulting to women, but also significantly less useful as an actual COVID-19 vaccination decision guide. You want such things to be as clear and easy to follow as possible, and deleting the word “women” doesn’t do that.
The document does not mention woman or women anywhere except in links to other websites or in the title of footnote references to other publications.
The word ‘mother’ is used just twice in the entire eight page booklet. In all, more than 50 different mentions of women have been deleted from the original version and replaced by ‘people’ or ‘those who are pregnant’, sparking fury among some women.
Included in the changes are non-specific sentences like: ‘Pregnant people are a priority group for Covid-19 vaccination’ and ‘Those who are pregnant have a higher risk of severe illness from Covid-19’.
No debate, understand?
“Pregnant people are a priority group” but pregnant women aren’t. Imagine the horror of women being a priority for a health campaign.
“People … planning pregnancy” includes males planning to impregnate women. I don’t think that there are any specific COVID-19 vaccination concerns for them, but the stupid vague language does make it sound that way!
Anyone else find it weird that women have been campaigning forever to be seen as full people, and now that, finally, the word ‘people’ is being applied, it’s to women doing something which they can do and men can’t, in order to erase that very fact?
Oh yes. Or not so much weird, exactly, as just all too pathetically predictable.