In Commentary Magazine, Christine Rosen notes that the Biden Administration is doing everything in its power to remake the U.S. federal government in the image of the LGBTetc. Movement—and that includes erasing motherhood:
This week, the Centers for Disease Control revealed its guidance on COVID vaccinations for what it called “pregnant and recently pregnant people.” Earlier CDC guidance for pregnant women has now been altered to reflect the new dispensation to erase any mention of women or mothers: Old links on the CDC’s website take you to pages that replace the word “women” with “people.” Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and ABC News dutifullyrepeated the CDC’s new “pregnant people” phrase in their coverage of the vaccine announcement.
The substitution of “people” for “women” is not innocuous. Indeed, it is part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to change how the federal government not only talks about its citizens but devises policies that impact them. In February, the administration announced its intention to stop using words like “alien” to describe illegal immigrants, for example, and as the New York Times noted, “across the government, L.G.B.T.Q. references are popping up everywhere. Visitors to the White House website are now asked whether they want to provide their pronouns when they fill out a contact form: she/her, he/him or they/them.”
The effort is government-wide. It includes the words that can appear in news releases, executive orders, federal forms, and online portals used by Americans for an array of government services. Even history is being altered to reflect the new ideological demands: the White House changed references to past presidents from “he” to “they.”
The Times was clearly enthusiastic about the change and made no pretense of hiding its bias in its own reporting on the subject. “It is all part of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to rebrand the government after four years of President Donald J. Trump,” the paper’s dispatch read, “in part by stripping away the language and imagery that represented his anti-immigration, anti-science and anti-gay rights policies and replacing them with words and pictures that are more inclusive and better match the current president’s sensibilities.”
But these supposedly “inclusive” efforts erase women and mothers. In June, during testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Senator James Lankford questioned Biden’s Health and Human Service Secretary Xavier Becerra about why the word “mother” had been replaced by “birthing people” throughout his agency’s proposed budget. Becerra could not offer a reasonable response; indeed, he could not even bring himself to say the word “mother” at all. Nor could he offer a reasonable definition of “birthing people.”
The Biden administration and its liberal elite supporters assume that, because their motivation in making these alterations to language is inclusivity, these changes are largely innocuous (and anyone who opposes them must be a bigot). As University of California, Los Angeles, anthropologist Norma Mendoza-Denton told the Times, “Biden is trying to reclaim the vision of America that was there during the Obama administration, a vision that was much more diverse, much more religiously tolerant, much more tolerant of different kinds of gender dispositions and gender presentations.”
But these seemingly innocuous word alterations signal controversial ideological positions, which is why the “pregnant people” Newspeak so glibly used by the CDC generated an immediate and understandable backlash, just as “birthing people” had done earlier in the summer.
The use of “people” deliberately erases motherhood and devalues women. “People” can’t get pregnant. Only those who are born biologically female can have babies. Particularly in the case of a government agency that claims to offer health guidance and wants Americans to “follow the science,” it’s absurd to suggest, as the CDC is doing with this language change, that men can become pregnant.
Read the whole thing. Sometimes, it is hard not to wonder how America became more woke than Europe in just a few decades. Other days, it is obvious: The progressives own the Democratic Party. There is no centre. Ordinary liberals do not exist. A total radicalization has taken place: Either you think men can get pregnant, or you’re banished to the No Man’s Land between the Democrats and the Republicans, wondering how everything got so crazy so quickly.
