Shocker

I’m amazed.

The Guardian has a great big long piece on childbirth and it uses the taboo word “women” throughout. I could hardly believe what I was reading. Not one single mention of “people who identify as” or “and non-binary people” or just plain “people” where it should be “women.” There are mentions of parents but only where it makes sense, not where it glaringly obviously doesn’t.

“It’s lovely to know other mums hitting the same hurdles as you, so you don’t feel alone,” says Sinead Knights, 38, a travel industry manager from Manchester who did NCT classes in October 2023. She describes them as “a space to share ideas and ask questions and not feel judged” and says she meets up with the mothers from her group weekly. “Hopefully, our babies will be friends for a long time, as the mums will as well,” Knights says.

That’s in the GUARDIAN. Can you believe it? Other mums, mothers, mums.

Childbirth, said Dick-Read, is not inherently painful. It hurt when women – usually educated women in western countries – felt fear, through what he called the “fear‑tension-pain syndrome”. If women relaxed and stopped worrying about childbirth, they could have painless, unmedicated births. Dick-Read became the NCT’s first president and his teachings were enthusiastically promoted by middle-class women, who met at antenatal groups in each other’s homes.

See what I mean? Openly discussing childbirth as something that women do. No pause to include our enby siblings, just women women women.

And it’s all like that, paragraph after paragraph. The word “women” appears 44 times.

Something has shifted.

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