We’re not confused.

I’m not confused, but I’ll have a look.

Beyond these clinical technicalities, for many people pregnancy also starts before conception in a figurative sense.

I’m definitely not confused, I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re pandering to a stupid fad for pretending that we don’t know which sex does the baby-having.

…two medical centers in the US, Baylor University Medical Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, are now offering uterus transplants to allow XX-carrying people lacking a functional uterus to gestate their own children after all…

…The OB/GYNs I saw during that time seemed to be focused more on the people having babies than on those who were unable to. And for women requiring other sorts of remedies for infertility, from IVF to uterus transplantation, costs are often paid from their own pockets. 

Whoops! Missed one.

A note from the EIC regarding the language used in this issue

I happily turned over the editorial pen to The Scientist’s managing editor, Jef Akst, for this special issue on pregnancy. But the TS editorial team had such a rigorous conversation surrounding the language we used in these stories that we thought it was necessary to include a brief mention of this facet of creating this body of work. Specifically, we wanted to be mindful of using inclusive language in discussing the science of pregnancy. From my own perspective, considering pregnancy as a phenomenon that extends beyond “women” did not occur automatically. But as we got down into the nitty-gritty of the subject matter at hand, I was made aware (via the thoughtful input of my colleagues) that we risked excluding nonbinary and transgender individuals from the discussion if we did not carefully consider our words.

So they decided to exclude women instead.

… other studies of pregnancy simply recorded that subjects were female. Where possible, we included these types of specifics in discussing particular studies (see the mention of “XX individuals” above). In other spots that considered the broader applications or impacts of research or healthcare involving pregnancy, we referred to “people” rather than “women.”

Go us! We veiled women with our words!