Australia’s Labor Party is disappearing women from its policies.

Labor has “betrayed” women by axing the words “mother”, “breastfeeding” and “pregnant women” from its official policy platform, say women’s rights advocates.

The official ALP National Platform, a blueprint for its direction in government, has even got rid of an entire section devoted to “maternal and child health”.

Because…what? None of that is needed any more?

The current 2021 policy document which “sets out the contemporary policy agenda that an Albanese Labor Government will implement” does not mention the word mother once.

In the older 2018 version it spoke about mothers four times, and also had references to pregnant mothers and breastfeeding.

Now the new policy references “people” and “individuals” who are pregnant, which feminists say is part of a transgender debate around “erasing” female specific words.

Same old same old. Erasing women from all conversations out of some warped impulse to humor a tiny fraction of the population who think they’re the opposite sex.

“ … Labour supports the rights of individuals to make decisions regarding their reproductive health,” the updated policy now states.

See that makes no sense. Reproductive health is vastly simpler for men; women have a lot more needs around repro health than men do. Also (though far from unrelatedly) women are the subordinated of the two sexes, so disappearing us is disappearing the people who are in a permanent struggle for equal rights. Imagine Labor dropping all words that related to indigenous people in Australia – would anyone think that was a good idea?

Another sentence says: “ … whether people choose to continue their pregnancy or not”.

Which is insulting. If “people” got pregnant then women wouldn’t be subordinated. It’s the pregnant-getting that is why women are subordinated. To pretend that pregnancy is a universal experience, while not ceasing to subordinate women, is a massive grotesque insult.

Oh look, scrolling down I see

Oh look, scrolling down I see

Oh look, scrolling down I see

Oh look, scrolling down I see Coalition for Biological Sex founder Stassja Frei made the same point I did:

“We don’t elevate the rights of indigenous Australians by referring to them simply as ‘people’.

What I’m saying.