Don’t take away our NAME
Don’t do that.
It’s not “people,” it’s not randomly assorted “people” who somehow found themselves pregnant, it’s not a wide-open set of people that we have no word for. It’s women. It’s the sex that has always been viewed as and treated as both inferior to and subordinate to men. If you can’t call them “women” then you lose sight of that systematic subordination, and the contempt and loathing that goes with it. It’s ethnic minority women that Harvard Med is talking about here. It knows that but…
And the hashtag refers to “maternal justice”; no reference to the “fathers” who give birth, no substitution of “parental justice”. They know, but they have to parrot the approved terms.
Planned Parenthood, who as we know has been heavily into promoting “inclusive” language like “pregnant people” lately, called me to seek a donation. The spiel talked, appropriately, about women and mothers, not “pregnant people”. I considered but decided against praising the caller for the women-centered text and complaining about the organization’s embrace of gender ideology at the expense of women.
The average person would probably assume that the phrase “birthing people” refers to midwives, obstetricians, nurses, and duennas. At least, that’s how I would have interpreted it 5 years ago. It would make some sense in context, too, though it’s not what they mean.
They’re going to have to get more explicit. This might be a problem if they’re hoping to gradually slide the general public away from sex to gender through shifts in language.