While well-intentioned, a trend to remove words including “women” and “mothers” from language used in maternity information risks dehumanising women, researchers say.
Governments and institutions are grappling with how to approach gender terminology. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald can reveal that a Federal Health Department guide for pregnant and breastfeeding women regarding COVID-19 vaccination and its impact on pregnant women was edited last year to remove the term “women”, introducing errors into the scientific accuracy of the material in the process.
The source information compared disease severity of COVID in pregnant women with non-pregnant women, but when the department removed the word “women” it compared “pregnant people” with “non-pregnant people”, changing the meaning to incorrectly include men.
The department released three versions of the document, the last of which reinstated the word “women”. A spokesperson for the department said the updated guidance was published following clarification of advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation and was approved by the department.
A co-author of the new paper and former president of the Australian College of Midwives, Jenny Gamble, a midwifery professor at the UK-based Centre for Care Excellence for Coventry University and the university hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire, said sex-based language “is important due to sex-based oppression”.
“Confusing the idea of gender identity and the reality of sex risks adverse health consequences and deeper and more insidious discrimination against women,” she said. “Sex [a reproductive category], gender [a societal role], and gender identity [an inner sense of self] are not synonymous but are being treated as if they are.”
“Pregnancy, birth and early motherhood are fundamentally sexed issues, not gendered. Pregnant and birthing women and new mothers and their infants have unique vulnerabilities and also require protection.”
Researchers have lamented the exclusion of women from medical research for decades and researchers have campaigned for more biologically targeted research to understand the difference between the sexes.
Professor Gamble said the trend of erasing or redefining the term “women” had started to sweep the world and that “coming from Australia it seems that the way the UK has moved to erase the use of sexed language has been rapid and extreme”.
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