I have had a lot of interest in birth since my very first childbirth experience in 1989. Searching for answers I found the International Cesarean Awareness Network (I-CAN) which educated and empowered me to have two vaginal births and even two home births. I also had the best-scheduled Cesarean I could have ever imagined with my last baby 11 years ago.
Now that I have two-daughters, a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter I am even more interested in birth and the issues surrounding birth for the safety and overall well-being of my girls.
So I appreciated the work on Evidence Based Birth. This is a site that examines why certain things are done in hospitals and by doctors for and to laboring women and whether or not there is any scientific or medical reason for doing those things. For example, this article on that site about the necessity of giving eye drops to every newborn baby is discussed in a thoughtful manner with easy to read conclusions (and no, every baby doesn’t need eye drops and it’s kind of dumb to it for Cesarean babies who came into the world with intact membranes!)
Learning and reading about birth was one of my safe places. I loved reading birth stories and studies that I could pass along to make birth safer and a better overall experience. There was a comraderie between mothers who had been hurt by their bad birth experiences, and younger moms looking to avoid the problems their mothers had faced.
But a new issue has entered the field. and it’s a shame because women and mother’s are in the midst of losing their identity for the sake of trans-men who have decided that they at least want to hold on to part of their feminine side at least long enough to birth a baby.
This weekend, their Facebook page linked to this article about failure to progress in labor (which is really failure to be patient for the caregiver) and studies about how long labor really does take and how much time women really need to give birth.
On the facebook page, someone questioned the lack of those words and feminine pronouns in the article.
This was my favorite:
And I weighed in.
And there it was on their “Methods Page.”
Use of Inclusive Language
Suspecting that my further comment on their Facebook page would be removed (it was) I linked to my blog Facebook page and reproduced the comment.
My comment in full:
This is a very good paper – but the inclusive language makes it almost unreadable. It’s not true that everyone feels comfortable and included in this ongoing battle over language. More and more inclusive- speak is confusing and alienating. The feminine pronouns are beautiful and descriptive, but we are in danger of losing them in modern writing. Less than 0.3% of the population is transgendered. Less than half of that logically is willing or able to give birth. And yet because of the big push to be all accepting all the time of every social change du jour, the vocabulary and language change almost on a weekly basis. It seems to me that the people who don’t want to be offensive to some are deceiving themselves. Inclusive language IS off-putting to many. It’s just that appeal to the popular makes it easier to make a different group uncomfortable. I also find it bizarre that ACOG is referenced on this site as an appeal to authority – an organization responsible for many of the problems birthing women have faced for decades, is probably not the best way to go if trying to be compelling and persuasive.
And also predictable came a warning that further discussion on this would be removed by the moderator.
So we are inclusive, we want you to be comfortable, as long as you agree with us.
Got it.