Recently U.S. Representative Cori Bush testified in front of congress about nearly losing her children during pregnancy due to a lack of adequate care. Hopefully, her testimony increases awareness and care for all mothers regardless of race. Unfortunately, while campaigning for this good cause, she used the term “birthing people” in place of “mothers.” She justifies that this novel term avoids discriminating against women who identify as men and subsequently give birth.
Words and concepts have consequences. We think with words. “Birthing persons” as a concept is merely the result of the logical progression of our culture’s increasingly reductive definition of “woman.”
On May 9 of this year, we celebrated Mother’s Day. On May 9, 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of Enovid, the first birth control pill. The propaganda then and now hailed the pill as a tool to set women free to plan their parenthood. In fact, it has redefined “woman” by separating maternity from femininity. I do not mean to suggest that a woman finds her identity insofar as she has children. Not at all. Countless women, many of them saints, have not had children. They understood that to be a woman means to have the potential to bear children, whether in fact or in the life-giving manner she relates to the world. A woman’s body teaches us that we cannot separate maternity from femininity.
One wonders how a culture defines “woman” that thinks a man can become one simply by undergoing cosmetic surgical changes. One consequence of that definition may be that this will be the last year we celebrate “Mother’s Day.”
