The only thing worse than a presidency that runs on pandering is a presidency that doesn’t even pander consistently.
Hello, President Joe Biden!
The president’s 2022 fiscal year budget supplants the word “mothers” with the absurd, dehumanizing term “birthing people” in a section outlining the administration’s plans for public health funding.
Comically enough, the section still uses the word “maternal,” which comes from the Latin (“mater”) for “mother.” It’s not just stupid pandering to a very specific niche of the Democratic base. It’s also inconsistent. What’s even the point of using “birthing people” if you’re still going to use “maternal”?
Biden’s budget includes a section titled “Investing in Public Health Infrastructure,” with a subsection titled, “Reduces Maternal Mortality Rate and Ends Race-Based Disparities in Maternal Mortality.”
“The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, with an unacceptably high mortality rate for Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and other women of color,” the budget reads.
It adds [emphasis added], “To help end this high rate of maternal mortality and race-based disparities in outcomes among birthing people — and in addition to the investment in maternal health included in the American Families Plan— the Budget includes more than $200 million to … reduce maternal mortality and morbidity rates nationwide,” among other things, including, bolstering “Maternal Mortality Review Committees” expanding “the Rural Maternity and Obstetrics Management Strategies program” and helping “cities place early childhood development experts in pediatrician offices with a high percentage of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program patients.”
“Mothers.” The term the Biden administration is looking for is “mothers.”
This “birthing people” nonsense is a product of the LGBT movement and its desire to discuss motherhood in the context of biological women who now identify as men. You can’t call them “mothers” because they’re men now, so you have to use the weirdly dehumanizing, anti-women term “birthing people,” replacing the word “mother” with intentionally androgynous language to placate people’s various identities.
Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, who is black, used the term “Black birthing people” recently to refer to black mothers during a House Oversight Committee hearing. The pro-abortion non-profit organization National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League backed her play, “explaining” in a follow-up statement that “it’s not just cis-gender women that can get pregnant and give birth. Reproductive freedom is for every body.”
These are the people endorsing this language.
As if it weren’t bad enough already that the Biden administration explicitly promotes this type of backward thinking, the same White House budget still uses the word “maternal.”
The administration wants it both ways, paying lip service to its overzealous and incredibly loud LGBT base while also using accurate language to explain what it actually wants to do for mothers.
What’s the old saying? If you try to please everyone, you please no one?
The difference here is the White House’s pandering to one party explicitly harms another, taking away from women a term recognizing their greatness and displacing it with meaningless one-size-fits-all language, which the administration recognizes anyway with the use of the word “maternal.”
It can’t even pander correctly. Yet, it tries anyway because there’s apparently nothing more important to liberals and Democrats today than adhering to the whims and tone policing of the fringiest left-wing groups.
Truly, the greatest trick the patriarchy has ever pulled was convincing liberals that stripping women of the things that make them unique to appease trans men is somehow the progressive and “inclusive” thing to do.