It shouldn’t take a Minister for common sense to prevail

Radio NZ reports:

The coalition has directed Health New Zealand to say “women” instead of “pregnant people” in its communications about health issues.

Associate Health Minister Casey Costello wrote to interim chief executive Dr Dale Bramley on 27 March, telling the agency to use “clear language”.

“Recent documents that have reached my office from the Ministry of Health have referred to women as ‘pregnant people’, ‘people with a cervix’ or ‘individuals capable of childbearing’,” she said in the letter.

“Only women and people of the female sex can get pregnant and birth a child no matter how they identify.”

What is amazing is that 18 months after a new Government came in, the health bureaucrats were still using terms that attract endless derision. Rather than do the common sense thing, they have carried on their woke agenda, and forced the Minister to actually write to them to tell them to stop it.

For the avoidance of doubt, any individual who is pregnant should be treated with respect, and communicated with in line with their gender identity.

But that level of respect and politeness is not the same as trying to delete all references to women from maternity services. The vast vast vast majority (99.989%) of pregnant women identify as women. To throw away the term women in regards to pregnancy because a minuscule percentage of pregnant women identify as a man is just crazy.

Data from the US finds that around 400 of the 3.6 million annual births are to transgender males. That is a rate of 0.011% or 1 in 9,500. To insist that the term women can no longer be used for pregnancies because 1 in 9,500 pregnant women identify as men is again crazy. Now again those 1 in 9,500 should have their gender identity respected by the health system on an individual basis, but not at the expense of deleting all references to women from pregnancy.

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