MOTHER GETS CANCELLED

“Mother” and “woman” are now deemed inappropriate words in certain policy documents for staff issued by the General Medical Council. “Mother” is no longer used in a maternity policy and is being replaced by “people”. In the menopause policy “women” have also been replaced by “people”. There is something perhaps insulting in denying the most important and powerful relationship in the world, that of mother and child, its proper language.

This comes on top of guidance issued by the National Institute for Care and Excellence, NICE, which decides, among other things, medical treatments which are worth funding: they refer to “pregnant people” over the use of “women”; and when it comes to prostate cancer, a very male thing, “people” replaces “men”. And then certain NHS Trusts prefer “birthing people” to “women” when it comes to maternity. It is odd they have not changed the word “maternity” which after all means the state of motherhood. It is odd too that “gynaecology”, medical treatment of women, survives the gender activists’ purges. 

Is it not very important, especially when it comes to medical matters where it cannot be assumed that everybody is knowledgeable, that there is total clarity as to who a topic is directed? Decisions to cease to use normal language that people in general understand seem perhaps foolish, driven by some ideology obsessing perhaps an intellectual few who insist on dictating to the sensible majority. Does the medical profession seem, at least in part, to be governed by an executive class of untouchables, unaccountable to anyone at all?